Floppies not readable in all drives

Extracted from debian-user
Tip provided by Sebastian Canagaratna
> >    I am using Debian 2 Linux, installed recently. The new version
> >    has superformat instead of fdformat. I am able to use superformat
> >    to format  floppy disks ( superformat /dev/fd0 ) and use the
> >    disks, but I am unable to mount the disk on the machine at home
> >    ( or vice versa ). The floppy drive controllers on the two machines
> >    are different, I presume. But is this a bug, or do I have to
> >    give some parameters when formatting? The floppy disks are 1.44 MB
> >    high density, double sided.
>
> This looks remarkably like a problem I see here (part of my job involves
> supporting a cople hundred PCs).
>
> The problem is O/S independent. I suspect that you have floppy drives that
> are misaligned or have differnt timing or something (I can't tell you
> exactly what the problem is - it's not worth putting an oscilliscope on a
> AUD$26 floppy drive).
>
> Solution: Just replace one or both drives - you'll have to experimment to
> see which one needs replacing (probably the home PC if the lab PC can read
> and write floppies to/from other PCs or vice versa).

Thank you for your suggestion. In my case, I discovered that
when I form the ext2 file system on the floppy if I use
mke2fs /dev/fd0 I get the problem of transferability, but
if I use, after superformat /dev/fd0 hd, mke2fs /dev/fd0 1440
the  problem disappears.                              

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Appears in section(s) : hardware disk
Tip recorded : 07-12-1998 19:51:36
HTML page last changed : 27-07-1999 20:06:40