count me in civilme. You hit a cord there. I cant see why we cant have
Linux-ona-LS120 mini distros.
Michael Webb
aka GNUDE
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Civileme
Sent: Saturday, 18 March 2000 6:53 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [expert] The Orphan LS120/LX120
The LS120 is a magneto-optical cartridge drive with the modest capacity of
120Mb. Its principal claims to fame are that it will read and write
ordinary
floppies and it will store slightly more than a ZIP drive. Like the
internal
IDE Zip it takes one slot on an IDE channel, and early BIOSes that supported
it
would boot it from the master positions only.
The saga of LS120s on this list has not been a happy one in most cases.
I happen to like the little beasties because their performance as floppy
disk
drives is superior to ordinary floppies. The lifetime is longer, the
positioning is consistent and deteriorates much more slowly, and the R/W
speed
with proper software approaches what one could expect from the rotational
latency of a floppy, in other words, much faster than an ordinary floppy
drive.
I have several of the LS120s in service and I have NEVER SEEN an LS120
cartridge. And yes, if someone made a $50 floppy drive that performed like
these, I would buy it.
All that said, what is wrong with the LS120?
Well if you include a CD-RW drive and an LS120 in a linux installation
(Mostly
Mandrake AIR this would apply to), the inclusion of the ide-scsi model may
cause the LS to be recognized as /dev/scx. The "cure" seems to be to
compile
the kernel with ide-floppy in the kernel, and not as a module.
The versions now in cooker solve most of the rest of the LS120 problems,
though
supermount seems a bit iffy yet, and mkbootdisk still can't make a bootable
floppy from one though a bootable cartridge is supposed to work. (The
failure
is when /sbin/lilo calls mknod on the device, for floppy disks only).
One of the things asked is.... would anyone ever partition an LS120? W
obvioulsy don't partition floppies. ZIPs usually work on partition
/dev/hdx4
(for factory DOS-formatted cartridges, and MAC formatted cartridges as
well).
Anyway I think if we had an idea how to handle the partitioning, then the
gurus
at Mandrakesoft could figure out what to do with this nasty critter. I
would
suggest, for the sake of simplicity, that we propose it as a
single-partition
device, because, these days, 120Mb isn't much at all, and it seems ludicrous
to
add a lot of extra effort to make it multipartition with one media and
single
with another. (And if you want to propose partitioning for 1.44Mb floppies,
I
want your IP address<g>.)
I hate to report that Win98 boot disks spit out of an LS120 at 2 per minute
(including formatting and disk switching times) and it may take the LS120 up
to
a minute to hand kfm a directory of a floppy in Mandrake 7.0, if you have
the
LS120 in fstab as an ide and you have installed the ide-scsi module for a
CDRW.
Formatting a floppy drive on an LS120 in Mandrake seems to work though
anyone
who has tried has to double-check to see that it worked, because it is FAST.
Well, what's to do?
1-> Propose a standard for handling partitions on the cartridges
2-> Experiment more with floppies... Can we do a dd or rawrite of say
tomsrtbt
onto one using the LS120? If we can do rawrite but not dd, then what is
stopping us, definitions, or code deficiencies?
Anyone interested in making a mini-project of this, email me privately.
Civileme
