Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!snorkelwacker!usc!wuarchive!udel!mmdf
From: JAGBDED1%PANAM.BITNET@ricevm1.rice.edu
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: Trouble with Amiga floppies - a possible solution
Message-ID: <33009@nigel.ee.udel.edu>
Date: 10 Oct 90 15:52:34 GMT
Sender: mmdf@ee.udel.edu
Lines: 38


Andy Tanenbaum writes:
>In article <1850@Terra.cc.brunel.ac.uk> eesrajm@cc.brunel.ac.uk (Andrew J
> Michael) writes:
>>If anyone trys this [copying Amiga disks on an ST or PC]
>> and either succeeds or fails, please let me know.
>
>Please post the results to the net.  It is now abundantly clear that
>they company that did the disk production munged the boot disk.  Fortunately,
>there is a backup file, minix.img.bu on it, which may save the day.  I am
>not yet sure how many other disks were badly copied.
>

   I was able to duplicate the 720K floppies on an AT clone using Copy II PC.
The P-H disks seem to be ok as far as that goes: they seem to be real 720K
9 sectors/track floppies.  The boot floppy was easily duplicated with
the Amiga.

>Part of the problem is that the company was instructed to copy disk 1 as
>an Amiga disk and the rest as PC 720K disks.  This instruction was repeated
>many times in many media (phone, letter, FAX, ...) but they probably couldn't
>believe it, and did it their way instead.  After all, they are the experts
>on disk copying, and I am merely a humble user.
>
>Andy Tanenbaum (ast@cs.vu.nl)

   This is not the real problem though.  The minix floppy driver is somehow
corrupting every floppy it writes on.  If you run minix without write
protection, you soon end up with many unreadable floppies.  This has serious
implications: you can't do anything (like recompile,edit,copy) on an Amiga.
The only people in a position to correct the floppy driver are the 1.5 ST
people. Needless to say, I'm bathing in frustration over here.  I can only
hope that the problem can be resolved with a minimum of pain.

Joe "AmigaMan" Gonzalez
JAGBDED1@PANAM
jagbded1%panam.bitnet@ricevm1.rice.edu
 Amiga:  floppies without sector gaps, who would have guessed?