Hi, I'm new to this list, but I've been on the rescue and geeks list for many years.
I'm kind of a Unix guy, but unlike many of you, I learned mostly on AT&T Unix. I started using Unix in the early '80s and ran a public access Unix system from roughly '87 to '92, when it turned into a real ISP, which got to be quite large. We mostly used Dec Alpha stuff then. I couldn't afford a Sun workstation in the '80s, so ran SVR2/3/4 on Intel hardware, and even that was expensive. These were the days of 1200bps Smartmodems (which were also pricey) and terminal or BBS interfaces. The Unix systems provided Usenet, real email and even rudimentary file transfer via UUCP. I still love the terminal based interface and won't run X on my old hardware. I'm really a Unix Philosophy sort of guy. Small tools, filters, and all the rest. So, on to my question: I run UnixWare 2.02 on a couple of older machines here at home. It is a pretty standard version of SVR4 if you don't install the Netware stuff. It is very stable and runs great on the older Pentium hardware I have. Recently I build a dual processor P3 system with an ASUS P2B-D MB so I could run SVR4-MP, which runs wonderfully. These are SCSI systems with SCSI2SD boards used as disk drives. Old 50 pin SCSI drives are getting more expensive and have questionable longevity. I want to build some emergency rescue diskettes and tapes, and my problem is that the 3.5" floppy will not format a diskette under UnixWare. I've tried everything I can think of. The drive is good (I can format a DOS floppy when I boot up DOS), and the diskettes are known good. When I use the format command on the raw disk device, I get the following: # /usr/sbin/format -V /dev/rdsk/f03dt formatting. UX:format: ERROR: Formatted 0 out of 160 tracks: Failed in write/read/compare verification on track 0. Doing so without the -V verification just appears to merrily format the diskette, but it's not formatted. The device(s) I'm using are: crw-rw-rw- 5 root sys 1,112 Feb 14 1995 /dev/rdsk/f03ht or crw-rw-rw- 5 root sys 1,112 Feb 14 1995 /dev/rdsk/f03h Both yield the same error. I'm thinking this must be a device driver problem, but i"m out of my league here. Anybody have an idea what's going on and how to fix it? Oh, and sorry for the long post. I thought it might be polite to introduce myself. TIA, Tom