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From: brant@manta.UUCP (Brant Cheikes)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.att
Subject: selecting UNIXpc floppies: some advice
Message-ID: <158@manta.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 3-Nov-87 01:23:25 EST
Article-I.D.: manta.158
Posted: Tue Nov  3 01:23:25 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 7-Nov-87 10:33:49 EST
Reply-To: brant@manta.UUCP (Brant Cheikes)
Organization: Soul of the Gnu Machine, Philadelphia
Lines: 21
Keywords: UNIXpc 3B1 PC7300 diskettes

I've acquired a lot of experience with floppy diskettes on the UNIXpc,
what with distributing Gnu Emacs and all, and that experience says:
when buying floppy diskettes to use on a UNIXpc, make *sure* you get
disks with hub rings.  Why?  I'm not sure.  But each time I've had
trouble formatting a floppy or encountered data transfer errors, I've
checked the diskette and found, almost without exception, that it
lacked hub rings.  The errors that get logged to /usr/adm/unix.log
look like:

FDERR ST:8 TR:4 SR:7 DR:6C DMACNT:FFFF DCRREG:F0 MCRREG:9900

Even worse, I've sometimes been able to "successfully" format such a
floppy and "successfully" copy a cpio archive to it, only to discover
later that the data cannot be retrieved (cpio errors like: "I/O error
reading header; aborting").  'Nuff said, the evidence speaks for
itself.
-- 
Brant Cheikes
University of Pennsylvania
Department of Computer and Information Science
ARPA: brant@linc.cis.upenn.edu, UUCP: ...drexel!manta!brant