Sun 3/80 floppy disks

[Harvard Townsend]

In article <2872 at brazos.Rice.edu> jaysun at omni.eng.clemson.edu (Jay Williamson) writes:
]>X-Sun-Spots-Digest: Volume 8, Issue 189, message 15 of 22
]>We have a couple Sun 3/80's with floopy disks.  The problem is that
]>fdformat will not work, neither will eject.  It seems to be some problem
]>with the device names.  We did a MAKEDEV fd0, just like the manual says
]>(The manual says this mounts the device I was not aware that doing mknod
]>mounts anything).  This created /dev/fd0[a-h] and /dev/rfd0[a-h].  If
]>eject is typed then it gives no error, it returns like it did the right
]>thing but does not eject the disk.  If you try an fdformat -f as anything
]>but root then it returns "fdformat: could not open "/dev/rfd0c": Device
]>busy".  If root trys it then it returns 
]>
]>  Format failed : No such device or address
]>
]>MAKEDEV looks reasonable but is it leaving something out?  The kernel is
]>definitly finding the device at boot time but we are running a strange
]>configuration is it matters.  Only / and /tmp are local.  The rest of the
]>local space is swap.  If this has been discussed and dropped please excuse
]>me and point me in the right direction.  If it hasn't then send answers to
]>me and I will summarize later.

We had the same problem with our 3/80s.  It turned out that the addressing
switch on the drive itself was set to be device 1 instead of 0 (it is a
small black 4-position slide switch on the side of the drive -- it was set
in the 2nd position rather than the first).  Setting the switch to 0 cured
the problem.  We could not find this documented anywhere.  My guess is
that this was set to 1 rather than 0 at the factory because the majority
used to be shipped as an external drive rather than internal.  Who knows.
Anyway, it works now. Give it a try (our area Sun technician hadn't run
into this either).