Re: 5.25 floppy drive
Thanks to all. Solved. It was a multiple cause issue: 1st: BIOS Setting was incorrect (had to enable 1.2MB 5.25 rather than 3.5 which was it set to - an oversight in the firts place, that occured to me). 2nd: Cable issue: I had a combined cable (3.5 connector at the end and edge connector second but last. 3rd: in combination with 2nd: DS0 jumper issue. Anyway, I found a cable that had two edge connectors. In the end it turns out that the floppies that were lying in a drawer for 19 years, are producing read errors. I also learnt about fdcontrol. Floppy interface has changed significantly since Joerg Wunsch and Bruce Evans worked on them in the early FreeBSD days back in 1995 :) -- Christoph Am 01.10.2010 19:18, schrieb Warren Block: On Fri, 1 Oct 2010, Christoph Kukulies wrote: I'm in the need of reading some data from old 5.25 floppy media (1.2MB). I lent 2 drives from neighbour institutes at the university and after having recalled that the floppies have to be enabled in the BIOS I'm now seeing the fd0 device in dmesg (FreeBSD 8.0 RELEASE). I can do a dd if=/dev/fd0 of=/root/fd0.dmp The select light is lit, the head motor seems to get power but the spindle doesn't spin. Possibly a drive select issue. Some drives had jumpers or switches, some cables have flipped-around wires so the connectors are specific to one drive or another. If your cabling is straight-through with no funny business at the connectors, set the drive to DS0. If the cable has split out and flipped-over sections, DS1 should be set in the jumpers --but then it depends on which connector is used. ...I think, anyway, it's been a few years since I've had to use a 5.25. I tried that with two TEAC drives to no avail. Any clues what I may have forgotten? The drive is connected with the edge connector and the end is open. Does it need to be terminated? None that I've seen. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: 5.25 floppy drive
from Christoph Kukulies k...@kukulies.org: Thanks to all. Solved. It was a multiple cause issue: 1st: BIOS Setting was incorrect (had to enable 1.2MB 5.25 rather than 3.5 which was it set to - an oversight in the firts place, that occured to me). 2nd: Cable issue: I had a combined cable (3.5 connector at the end and edge connector second but last. 3rd: in combination with 2nd: DS0 jumper issue. Anyway, I found a cable that had two edge connectors. In the end it turns out that the floppies that were lying in a drawer for 19 years, are producing read errors. I also learnt about fdcontrol. Floppy interface has changed significantly since Joerg Wunsch and Bruce Evans worked on them in the early FreeBSD days back in 1995 :) -- Christoph Congratulations on solving your floppy problem, but I can understand your problems with floppies. They've gone bad with age for me too. I can read but not write, then I can't read and in most cases can't even reformat. FreeBSD installation sets structure (base.aa, base.ab, base.ac etc.) suggests that one could install from a big set of floppies, but there's no way I could get such a good set of floppies together. I think my 5.25 floppies and drive hold out better than the 3.5 floppies and drives. Tom ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: 5.25 floppy drive
On Sat, 02 Oct 2010 10:50:00 + Thomas Mueller mueller6...@bellsouth.net articulated: from Christoph Kukulies k...@kukulies.org: Thanks to all. Solved. It was a multiple cause issue: 1st: BIOS Setting was incorrect (had to enable 1.2MB 5.25 rather than 3.5 which was it set to - an oversight in the firts place, that occured to me). 2nd: Cable issue: I had a combined cable (3.5 connector at the end and edge connector second but last. 3rd: in combination with 2nd: DS0 jumper issue. Anyway, I found a cable that had two edge connectors. In the end it turns out that the floppies that were lying in a drawer for 19 years, are producing read errors. I also learnt about fdcontrol. Floppy interface has changed significantly since Joerg Wunsch and Bruce Evans worked on them in the early FreeBSD days back in 1995 :) -- Christoph Congratulations on solving your floppy problem, but I can understand your problems with floppies. They've gone bad with age for me too. I can read but not write, then I can't read and in most cases can't even reformat. FreeBSD installation sets structure (base.aa, base.ab, base.ac etc.) suggests that one could install from a big set of floppies, but there's no way I could get such a good set of floppies together. I think my 5.25 floppies and drive hold out better than the 3.5 floppies and drives. I had a similar problem last year on a Windows platform when a local municipality asked to move the data from nearly 500 5.25 disks to CD. The disks were in storage since mid 1990. I located an external 5.25 disk drive, they are dirt cheap, and attempted to copy the data. Like you pointed out, the majority of the disks were severely damaged. I finally settled on Spin-Rite http://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm to repair the disks. I had used it before and was familiar with its workings. It took nearly a week for us to get the disks repaired and copied; however, with only a couple of exceptions, the job ended successfully. I cannot comment on 3.5 vs 5.25 disks, except to say good riddance to both formats. -- Jerry ✌ freebsd.u...@seibercom.net Disclaimer: off-list followups get on-list replies or get ignored. Please do not ignore the Reply-To header. __ ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: 5.25 floppy drive
Hi Christoph, In the end it turns out that the floppies that were lying in a drawer for 19 years, are producing read errors. Do NOT throw them out. I have a tool that can rescue near all data. http://berklix.com/~jhs/src/bsd/jhs/bin/public/valid/ Cheers, Julian -- Julian Stacey: BSD Unix Linux C Sys Eng Consultants Munich http://berklix.com Mail plain text; Not HTML, quoted-printable base 64 spam formats. Avoid top posting, It cripples itemised cumulative responses. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
5.25 floppy drive
I'm in the need of reading some data from old 5.25 floppy media (1.2MB). I lent 2 drives from neighbour institutes at the university and after having recalled that the floppies have to be enabled in the BIOS I'm now seeing the fd0 device in dmesg (FreeBSD 8.0 RELEASE). I can do a dd if=/dev/fd0 of=/root/fd0.dmp The select light is lit, the head motor seems to get power but the spindle doesn't spin. I tried that with two TEAC drives to no avail. Any clues what I may have forgotten? The drive is connected with the edge connector and the end is open. Does it need to be terminated? -- Christoph ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: 5.25 floppy drive
On Fri, 01 Oct 2010 15:04:40 +0200, Christoph Kukulies k...@kukulies.org wrote: I'm in the need of reading some data from old 5.25 floppy media (1.2MB). I lent 2 drives from neighbour institutes at the university and after having recalled that the floppies have to be enabled in the BIOS I'm now seeing the fd0 device in dmesg (FreeBSD 8.0 RELEASE). Similat to this? % dmesg | grep ^fd fdc0: floppy drive controller port 0x3f2-0x3f3,0x3f4-0x3f5,0x3f7 irq 6 drq 2 on acpi0 fdc0: [FILTER] fd0: 1440-KB 3.5 drive on fdc0 drive 0 This is for a 3.5 drive of course, the 5.25's message should read similar. FreeBSD 7 here. I can do a dd if=/dev/fd0 of=/root/fd0.dmp The select light is lit, the head motor seems to get power but the spindle doesn't spin. I tried that with two TEAC drives to no avail. Strange, I would suspect drive electronics first... do you have a low end PC (DOS) to check the drives? The lowest level diagnosis tools are often the best. :-) Any clues what I may have forgotten? The drive is connected with the edge connector and the end is open. Sounds correct. Does it need to be terminated? No. The position on the cable selects which drive letter will be associated to a given drive; the one on the end is A:, the one on the middle is B:. A single drive is usually connected to the end of the cable. As the connector for 5.25 drive does have a gap, you can't wrongly connect it. The connector to the main board should also have a nose that prevents wrong cabling. Wrong cabling is indicated by a permanent (!) activity light on the drive. Instead of using dd, can you maybe access the drive using mount or the mtools (from ports)? If you encounter further problems, I can get a working drive and check here. I'm in a kind of working museum. :-) -- Polytropon Magdeburg, Germany Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0 Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ... ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: 5.25 floppy drive
On Fri, 1 Oct 2010, Christoph Kukulies wrote: I'm in the need of reading some data from old 5.25 floppy media (1.2MB). I lent 2 drives from neighbour institutes at the university and after having recalled that the floppies have to be enabled in the BIOS I'm now seeing the fd0 device in dmesg (FreeBSD 8.0 RELEASE). I can do a dd if=/dev/fd0 of=/root/fd0.dmp The select light is lit, the head motor seems to get power but the spindle doesn't spin. Possibly a drive select issue. Some drives had jumpers or switches, some cables have flipped-around wires so the connectors are specific to one drive or another. If your cabling is straight-through with no funny business at the connectors, set the drive to DS0. If the cable has split out and flipped-over sections, DS1 should be set in the jumpers --but then it depends on which connector is used. ...I think, anyway, it's been a few years since I've had to use a 5.25. I tried that with two TEAC drives to no avail. Any clues what I may have forgotten? The drive is connected with the edge connector and the end is open. Does it need to be terminated? None that I've seen. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
