You know, it's a lot easier to help you if you list the actual commands you
entered and their output. See my response inline below.
On 10/5/2012 1:00 AM, Jude DaShiell wrote:
I have a floppy drive debian and arch will not use. It works well enough
when I put an unformatted disk in it and boot the computer the boot
process is stopped and remains so until that floppy disk gets removed.
That doesn't mean anything except that your BIOS is set to boot the floppy
first. It could just as easily boot the CD first in which case your
unformatted disk would make no difference.
It's one of the 3.5 inch floppy disks and I noticed several different
possible formats for it in /etc/mediaprm when I checked that file. Even
new floppy disks with no low level formatting on them will not low level
format and forget about any other access operations. Unless I'm
overlooking something, there doesn't appear to be any command line tool to
do a floppy probe operation and write an appropriate configuration file or
update /etc/fstab. kde has kde-floppy but kde hasn't got accessibility to
the same extent command line users with speakup have or emacspeak or gnome
users have with orca. I'll probably be able to move files off floppy
disks if I can get the internal drive working or if that fails buy a usb
floppy and try to get that working.
I've never heard of low-level formatting a floppy, but that doesn't mean it
can't be done. No, you don't want a USB floppy drive. Apparently you can't
access the USB floppy controller directly. Do you have /dev/fd0? What
happens when you try to mount a floppy with something on it? Do you have
dosfstools installed? What happens if you use mkfs.vfat or mkfs.ext2 on
/dev/fd0 to format it?
From doing a Debian package search, it looks like you want the fdutils
package. If that doesn't work, your internal drive might be bad. You could
try booting a DOS boot disk and see what happens. Apparently there is a
grub rescue package which has floppy boot images, so you could try that. Do
you have DOS or another OS on that machine and does your floppy work with
the other OS? It shouldn't matter, but what about booting from a live CD
and attempting to access the floppy that way? If you go with USB, look at
the ufiformat package.
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