On Friday, February 17, 2017 5:33:02 PM EST Jonathan Riddell wrote: > On Wed, Feb 15, 2017 at 07:50:22PM +0100, Wolfgang Bauer wrote: > > On 11 February 2017 at 13:44, Jonathan Riddell <j...@jriddell.org> wrote: > > > I recommend KFloppy be removed from Applications releases. It > > > couldn't find my floppy drive and when I hacked the code to tell it > > > where to look it depended on an external tool fdformat which didn't > > > work anyway. > > > > KFloppy and fdformat work fine here in openSUSE, I do use it regularly > > (with an internal floppy drive). > > I'm in the disk user group. I'm using KDE neon which is Ubuntu 16.04 > as base. The drive is external and attached by USB. > > fdformat doesn't work from the command line > > >fdformat --no-verify /dev/sdc > > fdformat: could not determine current format type: Invalid argument
This sounds like a compatibility issue between the USB drive and fdformat; fdformat is going to be trying to determine the drive's low-level format, not it its partition table or filesystem; Floppy drives traditionally are more like a 3d printer or CNC machine than a block device; you have to tell the read/ write head physically where to go. USB drives may hide those controls. I could store 1.9MB of data on a 1.44MB disk eons ago, through low-level formatting, but I can't do that with USB floppy drives today. The problem is, you have a USB device that's more like a flash drive than a floppy drive, and KFloppy doesn't know which tools to access it with. Certainly a bug, but it's not a "this doesn't work with floppy drives" issue, it's (probably) a "fdformat doesn't handle the usb floppy interface" issue. Hang a ribbon cable floppy drive from your local computer recycle center off the MFM controller on a desktop's motherboard, and it will probably work just fine.
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