Floppy formatting and using

[Norman Kohn]

In article <1419 at igloo.UUCP> learn at igloo.UUCP (william vajk) writes:
>In article <43 at ushiva.UUCP>, raw at ushiva.UUCP (Roland Wilcher) writes:
>
>> Looks like the uport stuff can't deal with bad sectors on the floppy.
>> Also appears that the uport format program does not detect the bad 
>> sectors either.
>> comments ?
>
>If one follows the instructions included with runtime, one does a
>format, a labelit, and an mkfs. None of these added features are
>needed to make a cpio backup, and result in a LOT of wasted time.
>
Format will do just that; labelit won't look for bad sectors either.
The best simple way to scan for bad sectores is to use dd to copy
the volume to /dev/null. That way you don't even need to put a filesystem
on it.

Don't forget the bug (at least in uport 286) that causes silent errors
in the first format after boot.  If you reboot often, try reformatting
the disk rather then assuming it's bad.  If you seem to have a lot of
bad floppies, suspect your floppy drive. For some reason some drives
don't work happily with uport, and a simple drive swap may make quite
a difference.  (I've had to do it more than once.)


-- 
Norman Kohn   (...ddsw1!nvk!norman)
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