Sun 3/80 floppy disks

Jay Williamson jaysun at omni.eng.clemson.edu
Tue Nov 7 05:32:13 AEST 1989


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 /dev/rfd0c, 80 tracks, 18 sector/track ...
  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.

Jay Williamson                      Clemson University
Systems Programmer                  Computer Science Dept.



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