5 inch floppies

[fredex]

On Sat, Sep 03, 2005 at 10:55:28AM -0500, Michael Hennebry wrote:
> 
> I'm trying to read some old (duh) 5 inch
> floppies with a borrowed drive on an FC3 box.
> Probabaly there is more than one format,
> but I'm not sure which has which.
> The usual result is that I can read the
> directory by clicking on a KDE icon,
> but get I/O errors when trying to read any of the files.
> Trying to mount with a mount command also results
> in an I/O error.
> If I couldn't read the directory,
> I'd suppose that I was out of luck.
> Is there a reason that the directory
> would be easier to read than the files?
> Any ideas on how to read the files?

It's possible that the floppies have many bad spots on them. My 
experience is that floppies that are years old have a tendency 
to become unreadable as time passes.

As for how you are mounting them, assuming you've got the floppy
drive listed in /etc/fstab, something like this:

/dev/fd0 /mnt/fd0 auto noauto,noatime,user,exec 0 0

you should be able to do:

	mount /mnt/fd0

and have it "just work", assuming it's a known filesystem (msdos, vfat,
ext2) and a standard density (msdos 1.2mB and perhaps others). If that
doesn't work, you can do:

	ls /dev/fd0*

to see a list of all the various floppy densities that are explicitly
supported. See "man fd" for more information on this. Also see "man mount"
for details on options you can add that may help.

Fred

-- 
---- Fred Smith -- fredex at fcshome.stoneham.ma.us -----------------------------
               But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: 
                         While we were still sinners, 
                              Christ died for us.
------------------------------- Romans 5:8 (niv) ------------------------------
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