Is there anything besides hardware failure of the write
circuitry in either the floppy drive or the controller which
would make it able to perfectly read diskettes but not
format or write?
I did try the MAKEFLOPPIES script which ran correctly, but doing
a low-level format of a diskette produces:
$ fdformat /dev/fd0u1440
Double-sided, 80 tracks, 18 sec/track. Total capacity 1440 kB.
Formatting ...
Verifying ... 0 Read: : Input/output error
Problem reading cylinder 0, expected 18432, read -1
The computer works properly except for that. I did use
dd to read an entire diskette image and send it to a file. that
image makes perfect copies of the diskette if sent to another
UNIX system and it's floppy drive. The format command does count
up to track 80 and then immediately bombs when verification starts.
My guess is that the floppy controller which, of course, is part
of the mother board has gotten sick but I thought I should check
for possible corrupted configuration files before pointing
fingers. BTW, if you try to write a file to a good floppy on
this drive, the format is ruined and you must reformat the
diskette in a known good drive, but the system appears to write
the file without complaint. You just can't read anything off the
disk after that.
Martin McCormick WB5AGZ Stillwater, OK
Systems Engineer
OSU Information Technology Department Network Operations Group
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