I have just come to use my floppy drive and notice that it is not working. While booting there is an error regarding floppy.ko
The problem became apparent to me as I had tried something on the lines of:
cat image.z > /dev/fd0
And in return received
inserting floppy driver for 2.6.6-486
Floppy drive(s): fd0 is 1.44M
floppy0: Floppy io-port 0x03f2 in use
...
The device is a Umax Actionbook 330T,
430TX chipset MB.
1.44 MB drive.
Debian of the above version.
---Update---
I have delved a little deeper and come across what I expect to be the problem.
The laptop is old enough, and contains at least one ISA device, an ESS ES1869 Plug and Play AudioDrive. As yet I have little knowledge of isa configuration under Linux.
Having used ISA devices some years back when I was living in the DOS I realize that configuration problems may run rife until I have a good knowledge of configurations how's and wheres.
I made the step of installing the isapnptools however viewing the pnpdump file as used for isapnp.conf I find myself wondering if this is worthwhile for I suspect much fiddling and configuring may be ahead; certainly given my goals.
For what I have read so far - in the last hours, I expect:
I will have to recompile my kernel so that BlockDevices->NormalFloppySupport. The reason for this is because configuration needs to occur later, or rather before the driver is loaded and I am unaware of how to re-attempt a driver load for the failed floppy initialization (as is visible in DMESG).
It would be more helpful if I could simply provide configuration at some earlier stage, perhaps an initial bootscript parameter or kernel parameter but I have no knoweldge of way to achieve this.
In case you wondered, I did somewhat randomly attempt to disable everything in the system but alas to no avail and in any case my rather simplified BIOS allows little more than toggling of RS232, IR, LPT configuration, all else is hidden.
I have started to gather information on the subject.
http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/lin...11.2/0394.html
<snip>
The PCI IO address space is a 14-bit address space (bits 9:8 are always zero) ranging from 0x1000 to 0xFCFF. ISA IO is a 10-bit space (bits 15:10 are vailable for the card to use) ranging from 0x100 to 0x3FF.
VGA cards may be PCI and AGP, but still have allocations in the ISA range.
</snip>
---Update---
Have found this link to setting Kernel Arguments:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/debia...k/appd_05.html
---Update---
http://www.fifi.org/doc/HOWTO/en-htm...11.html#ss11.2
"There are many floppy driver options, and they are all listed in README.fd in linux/drivers/block."
---Update---
http://www.netraverse.com/member/dow...el_generic.php
"file is either /boot/grub/menu.lst or /boot/grub/grub.conf"
"pnpbios=off"
Checking DMESG, no "in use" error is present.
I then tried the command previously not possible:
cat rtl8139.zdsk > /dev/fd0
Low and behold the drive came to life.
On testing the disk all seems good and proper.
The End (please!)
