In article <464 at remsit.UUCP>, rem at remsit.UUCP (Roger Murray) writes:
> I have two dead floppy disks here. On day X (I don't remember how long ago
> this whole mess started), I took two fresh disks out, formatted them
> (/dev/fd096ds9, if you're interested), mkfs'ed them, mounted them (one at a
> time, of course) and filled them up with some 1- and 2-year-old data that I
> wanted to keep, but didn't need on the hard disk anymore.
>
> On day X+1, I decided to put some more data on them so I took them out of the
> really neat box where I kept them safe and sound and mounted them. Well,
> attempted to mount them anyway. Disk 1 had a bad block 2 and disk 2 had a bad
> super block and/or block 1. I have no idea what happened to these poor
> innocent floppies to make them turn on me so.
>
> I've tried fsck and dd. I tried copying them over to good disks from DOS
> with both DISKCOPY and COPYIIPC. DISKCOPY couldn't read sectors and COPYIIPC
> complained while writing out the new disk.
COPYIIPC would probably happily duplicate the errors. You could just "I"
when asked "Abort, Retry, Ignore?" on the diskcopy, but the format, as you
pointed out, would probably be _wrong_.
> If this were my Apple, I would have pulled out Bag of Tricks, reformatted
> track 0 and went back on my merry way, losing nothing in the process. It's
> bad enough I'm in a PC world, but under XENIX of all things. How do I explain
> to my PC disk editor that prompts me for a filename "Umm...well, you see this
> is a XENIX floppy. It has a a super block and i-nodes and..."?
I doubt that formatting track 0 would help, but if it blows your skirt up,
here's how to do it; you're not really formatting track 0, but the effect
is the same:
1) dd if=/dev/fd096ds9 skip=1 of=/tmp/foo
2) Format up a new disk
3) dd if=/tmp/foo skip=1 of=/dev/fd096ds9
If you wanted to be extra careful, you could dd the first block of an
ok disk with an fs onto there in case track 0 contained anything important
I think it does... don't know for sure; that's almost to hardware ;-)
If you really want to go overboard, open the device, seek past the error,
and read the thing into a file. Open the device for a new disk, seek to
the same location, and write it back out. This will work peachy for a 3b1,
which has this 4 block thinga-ma-bug at the front of the disks.
| Terry Lambert UUCP: ...{ decvax, ihnp4 } ...utah-cs!century!terry |
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