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From: nall@sun8.scri.fsu.edu (John Nall)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: Floppy drive not working
Keywords: pc, msdos, minix, disk
Message-ID: <3302@sun13.scri.fsu.edu>
Date: 24 Jun 91 18:45:39 GMT
References: <9117523.15390@mulga.cs.mu.OZ.AU>
Sender: news@sun13.scri.fsu.edu
Organization: SCRI, Florida State University
Lines: 29

In article <9117523.15390@mulga.cs.mu.OZ.AU> djk@cs.mu.OZ.AU (David Keegel) writes:
>
>My floppy drive has recently stopped working. Strangely enough, this
>corresponds to a recent period of lots of Minix use (like getting
>minix-386 going, shoelace, vc, uucp). I seem to remember some news
>about Minix doing nasty things to floppies, can someone help me out.
>
     Minix eats 1.2 meg floppy drives.  I ruined two different
     drives with it, before I started using Shoelace.  However,
     there was also a better version of bootblok.s posted to the
     net which is another way of solving the problem.  

>Suppementary question: using shoelace to load /etc/system/* from the
>boot floppy and then mounting root from ram image on hd3 causes my
>floppy motor to stay on until I access fd0 (eg: df /dev/fd0). Is this
>a known problem with shoelace? Can I stop it?
>
     Yep, a "known problem" (undocumented feature).  You can modify
     the source of shoelace, or just change your /etc/rc file to do a
     mount and unmount of /dev/fd0, which is a klutz but easy to do.
     (That way, you can stick it in the queue of "things to be fixed
     someday real soon..." and forget about it.



--
John W. Nall		| Supercomputer Computations Research Institute
nall@sun8.scri.fsu.edu  | Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306
  "Complete solitude is a torment which not even Hell threatens."