terry_lambert@gateway.novell.com
FAQ for floppy subsystem


Terry,

        I was thinking about starting several FAQ just for the
        device drivers I was working on, but I have not
        completely organized the group.  I would consider it
        a great favor if you would post this in your format.
        If this is too much work or you are toooo busy, just
        send it back.  You have the option of adding this to
        your list or.... starting a new one for.... or neither.

                Thanks in advance
                jmonroy@netcom.com

        AS of 15:00:54 Sat  02-20-1993


        1. How can I write the 386bsd boot floppy to a sparc's floppy drive?
           From: hasty@netcom.com (Amancio Hasty Jr)

           If you mean make a boot floppy for the sparc ...
           set up your file and try a dump... as in /bin/dd
           I think cpio will also do the job.


        2. Is there any problem acessing both floppies at the same time?
           From: vazquez@iqm.unicamp.br (Pedro A.M. Vazquez)

           Yes, this is a problem.  The code in release 0.1 has many such
           quirks. Use one drive at a time for now.

        3. Is there any way to read a 720K 3.5 inch DOS floppy in
           a 1.44 MEG 3.5 inch drive using mtools?
           From: klaus@ced.utah.edu (Klaus Biggers,MEB 3140b,581-6499)

           Sorry no, both mtools and 386BSD have problems, at this time
           with the use of under-capcity diskettes in the diskette drives.

        4. What is the function of the *strategy routines?
           From: lessen@axion.bt.co.uk (Lee Essen)

           "fdstrategy()" is called wheter the FDC (floppy disk controller)
           is  busy or not.  It checks the validity of the request and then
           decides to either que (add to the stochastic process) or start
           the FDC by passing the request to "fdstart()".

        5. MY Micronics 486/66 DX2 ISA MB w/8MB, 256K cache
           won't boot off a floppy?
           From: IZZYPI9@MVS.OAC.UCLA.EDU (Alexander Burchell)

           The problem is the bus speed. Most 33+ Nhz machines are running
           the bus at 10 or 12 Mhz, no one will admit it directly, but a
           frequency counter would confirm this.

           TO FIX: Enter the Eprom setup.
                   Slow down the CPU, the BUS SPEED, the DMA speed, and
                   IRQ (interrupt request) and ARQ (acknowledge request).
                   If it boots replace one function at a time.. start
                   from the top of the list.

                   Also note some numeric co-processor(387) chips are
                   doing bad things to the fdc (don't know why yet).


        6. I'd like to have the distribution on floppies in case
           for some reson I would like to install it on another system.
           How do I get them on a floppy for installation purposes?
           From: mdpc@netcom.com (M. D. Parker)

           To get the files from MS-DOS to a booted 386bsd machine one
           would use one of the "mtools" namely "mread", unfortuanley
           none of the other tools work yet (such as mdir).  This
           includes the one program you might need.... "mwrite".

        7, I have used the files dist.fs along with the dos program
           rawrite.exe to produce bootable 3.5" high density 386BSD
           boot disks, but I hae problems booting. What do I do?
           From: kuku@acds.physik.rwth-aachen.de (Christoph Kukulies)

           There problem is a hardwired < 15 (15 = Sectors per track).
           After changing that to 18 in the enviroment before booting
           one can have bootable floppies.

        8. I have some DOS-formatted floppies I would like to
           build filesystems on.  I ran "disklabel" then go the
           following error:

                ioctl DIOCSDINFO: Device not configured
                ioctl DIOCWLABEL: Device not configured

           what do I do?
           From: vax@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu (Vax)

           "disklabel" can be run on the floppy.
           Use the "-r" flag, and ignore the errors, it complains
           about a missing ioctl in the driver, but does it anyways.