Very VERY slow floppy

Misfit138 · 11-06-2006, 07:00 AM

I put a floppy in the drive, which has previously been formatted with fat32. I try to drag and drop the contents of a SATA RAID driver disk into the floppy. It starts churning away forever and ever, it is EXTREMELY SLOW. It will start by saying 32KB/s, but drops immediately to 16, 10, 8 then it says "stalled" every few seconds...can I fix this somehow? or is writing to fat32 floppies in Linux just slow?

here is my fstab floppy section

# fd: H1440
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto user,sync,exec,rw 0 0

lurko · 11-06-2006, 07:16 AM

if it doesn't take more than a minute or two(to fill a disk), I'd say that's the price of doing business with a floppy disk.

Misfit138 · 11-06-2006, 07:22 AM

no, it took more like 18 minutes, and I have a very fast smp pc, 2 gigs of ram......any ideas?

matthewg42 · 11-06-2006, 09:08 AM

Try removing the sync option in your fstab. Make sure you umount and wait for activity to cease before removing the disk.

Ha1f · 11-06-2006, 09:13 AM

could the disk have errors? try to do things with other floppy disks.

matthewg42 · 11-06-2006, 09:23 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ha1f

could the disk have errors? try to do things with other floppy disks.

That's a good point. Maybe check the system log or dmesg to see if there are errors reported on /dev/fd0.

Misfit138 · 11-06-2006, 12:45 PM

thx for the replies!
i will try another floppy tonight (i actually have to buy some, as i have no more!)
if not, i will try async.
while we're on floppies, how can i format a floppy with fat32 or ext3 or any other fs?

Misfit138 · 11-06-2006, 12:49 PM

thx for the replies!
i will try another floppy tonight (i actually have to buy some, as i have no more!)
if not, i will try async.
while we're on floppies, how can i format a floppy with fat32 ? i found this command for ext3, would i just substotute 'vfat' for 'ext3'? what does the 1440 denote?

mkfs -t ext3 /dev/fd0 1440

matthewg42 · 11-06-2006, 01:12 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Misfit138

how can i format a floppy with fat32 ? i found this command for ext3, would i just substotute 'vfat' for 'ext3'? what does the 1440 denote?

Code:

mkfs -t ext3 /dev/fd0 1440

The syntax for mkfs is as follows (from the mkfs man page - type "man mkfs" to see it):

Code:

mkfs [ -V ] [ -t fstype ] [ fs-options ] filesys [ blocks ]

The parts in [square brackets] are optional. From this you can see that the 1440 is "blocks". Reading on, this is the number of blocks on the device to format. 1440 corresponds to ~1.4 MiB - the size of the floppy disk. You can probably omit this parameter and the program will use the whole device.

Another way to accomplish the same thing is to use the command:

Code:

mkfs.vfat /dev/fd0

Misfit138 · 11-06-2006, 05:45 PM

When I do mkfs.vfat /dev/fd0 I get an error

failed whilst writing to reserved sector

??

??

matthewg42 · 11-06-2006, 05:59 PM

You need to run this as root / with sudo. Oh, and make sure the write tab window thing on the floppy is slid over to the covered position.

louieb · 11-06-2006, 06:30 PM

Floppy drives are notorious for breaking down. They get dirty, kids stuff things in the slot. People spill coke on the floppy disk then wipe it off and put the disk in the drive. When I go out to check a computer I alway have an extra floppy drive with me.
It may be that it is time for a replacement.

matthewg42 · 11-06-2006, 06:49 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by louieb

Floppy drives a notorious for breaking down. They get dirty, kids stuff things in the slot. People spill coke on the floppy disk then wipe it off and put the disk in the drive. When I go out to check a computer I alway have an extra floppy drive with me.
It may be that it is time for a replacement.

Checking if the same disk is slow under another OS might be a good way to test if the hardware is flaky before splashing out on a new device.

Misfit138 · 11-07-2006, 07:01 AM

Strange, the floppy works fine under windows. I am able to format and copy files to the same disk, with the same drive without a problem.
When i go into Linux and drag and drop stuff into the floppy I get the LONG LONG process of slow writing and stalling....when I do:

cp /home/user/Desktop/folder/* /mnt/floppy

It churns away for a few minutes and spits back input/output errors for each file.

I am stumped

matthewg42 · 11-07-2006, 07:07 AM

Can you paste the errors here?