I have two machines running Mandrake 8.1 with Mindi and Mondo installed. They work fine on one of them, but on the other I got the following error when I ran Mindi for the first time:

"Fatal error. Cannot format /dev/fd0u1722"

I sent my log to Hugo (the author of Mindi/Mondo) and he responded:

"Your computer will not let Mondo use the 'fdformat /dev/fd0u1722' command. You'll need to examine your PC and your Linux distribution to find out why."

*Note: the machine giving me the error is an older one -- IBM Aptiva 2159, P200 w/64MB RAM. It has a small "black box" attached to the tower via SCSI which contains the floppy and CD-ROM drive. Wierd design idea...

Where would I look in (a) my BIOS and (b) my distro to find the cause of the error?
And what does the trailing "u1722" after dev/fd0 mean?

Thanks!

I think it could be something to do with the size of the disk. I' pretty sure that that command should format the disk so that it's 1.72Mb rather than 1.44Mb. It won't work on all drives. I thought, however, that the command was with an h not a u.

There are many way of accessing floppy media and with the correct driver floppy can contain 1722 Kb (I'm not too sure about tecnical spec.)
Make sure of having device /dev/fd0u1722 with major, minor = 2, 60 or, if you are using devfsd, as a symlink to /dev/floppy/0u1722 (same major/minor). If you haven't mknod it (mknod /dev/fd0u1722 b 2 60).
If the problem still exist it can be about scsi:
if /dev/fd0 works try ll it for major different from 2 or somethink strange.

I think there can be an hardware limitation too, but you have to serch something more tec.

Thanks for the tips!

This is advanced stuff, and I'm at about an intermediate level of tech competency. But, I'll delve into it and see what works. (The list is long, my friends!)

computers: a lifelong process of optimization. (I think that definition should go into Websters. Any seconds on that motion? )