I would hazard a guess this is a broken installation procedure. The device was there and working before I switched to OpenSuSE. Thanks for your suggestion. The OpenSuSE installation procedure certainly didn’t load the correct module.
roland@linux-j7oz:~> lsmod | grep floppy
floppy 62936 0
I’ve added it to the loaded list via system-config editor and will try rebooting.
LS-120 support is busted all over more than any place else.
First: The installation procedure for 11.1 identifies the hardware, but doesn’t install any drivers for it.
After forcing the install of ide-floppy and rebooting I now have the following:
roland@linux-j7oz:~> lsmod | grep floppy
ide_floppy 14344 0
floppy 62936 0
ide_core 115068 4 ide_floppy,ide_scsi,ide_pci_generic,amd74xx
roland@linux-j7oz:~> dmesg
Of course, when I stick in an LS-120 floppy I still hear it chirp twice, then quit. dmesg still shows the following:
sd 0:0:1:0: [sda] READ CAPACITY failed
sd 0:0:1:0: [sda] Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE,SUGGEST_OK
sd 0:0:1:0: [sda] Sense Key : Medium Error [current]
sd 0:0:1:0: [sda] Add. Sense: Cannot read medium - unknown format
sd 0:0:1:0: [sda] Write Protect is on
sd 0:0:1:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 00 66 10 80
sd 0:0:1:0: [sda] Write cache: disabled, read cache: enabled, doesn’t support DPO or FUA
sd 0:0:1:0: [sda] READ CAPACITY failed
sd 0:0:1:0: [sda] Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE,SUGGEST_OK
sd 0:0:1:0: [sda] Sense Key : Medium Error [current]
sd 0:0:1:0: [sda] Add. Sense: Cannot read medium - unknown format
sd 0:0:1:0: [sda] Write Protect is on
sd 0:0:1:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 00 66 10 80
sd 0:0:1:0: [sda] Write cache: disabled, read cache: enabled, doesn’t support DPO or FUA
Sticking in a freshly formatted 1.44Meg floppy causes the “plugged in device notification” to pop up after quite a bit of chirping and one can read/write to the floppy. After doing all this dmessage shows:
sd 0:0:1:0: [sda] 2880 512-byte hardware sectors: (1.47MB/1.40MiB)
sd 0:0:1:0: [sda] Write Protect is off
sd 0:0:1:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 00 66 24 00
sd 0:0:1:0: [sda] Write cache: disabled, read cache: enabled, doesn’t support DPO or FUA
sd 0:0:1:0: [sda] 2880 512-byte hardware sectors: (1.47MB/1.40MiB)
sd 0:0:1:0: [sda] Write Protect is off
sd 0:0:1:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 00 66 24 00
sd 0:0:1:0: [sda] Write cache: disabled, read cache: enabled, doesn’t support DPO or FUA
sda:
So, My second guess is that someone “enhanced” the ide-floppy driver and now it no longer understands 120Meg floppies. Did they “enhance” it to support the double density version of this drive and break the original support? I believe there was a 240Meg version of this Super Floppy as well.
seasoned geek wrote:
> So, My second guess is that someone “enhanced” the ide-floppy driver
> and now it no longer understands 120Meg floppies. Did they “enhance” it
> to support the double density version of this drive and break the
> original support? I believe there was a 240Meg version of this Super
> Floppy as well.
Yes, and the documentation says that ide-floppy handles them as well.
My guess is that you need to unload floppy.ko as well as load
ide-floppy.ko. Both are likely to use the same ID’s, which means that
floppy.ko is in command even if ide-floppy.ko is loaded. Because most
of the world uses no floppy drives at all with standard floppy drives
in second place, I would expect the wrong one to be loaded by default.
Why are you so quick to blame some conspiracy when we have not yet
ruled out simple operational problems?
Who said anything about conspiracy, I’m talking about bugs due to lack of regression testing. This is an all-too-common problem with community efforts.
I have a physical 3.5" floppy drive as drive A and an IDE Super Floppy installed on this machine. Back when I ran XP this combination ran fine. It runs fine when I physically boot FreeDOS, and it ran fine under Ubuntu.
All of this hardware was present on the machine when I ran the OpenSuSE install. The install found it all and did not install the correct drivers. (OK, the floppy wasn’t there during the first install of OpenSuSE 11.1 because I wanted to document it, but I’ve had 3 other fresh installs since then and all hardware was present.)
How do I “force unload” floppy form the boot sequence? Doesn’t HAL got out at boot and look for devices and match them up with drivers?
A busted HAL would explain why the install was busted and the problem didn’t sweep itself up. If, as you say, floppy is assuming it can handle ALL floppy drives, when it clearly cannot. If Linux follows the traditional PC hardware check path, floppy drives would be checked prior to MFM, SCSI, then IDE, EIDE, SATA.
seasoned geek wrote:
> lwfinger;2005958 Wrote:
>> seasoned geek wrote:
>>> So, My second guess is that someone “enhanced” the ide-floppy driver
>>> and now it no longer understands 120Meg floppies. Did they “enhance”
>> it
>>> to support the double density version of this drive and break the
>>> original support? I believe there was a 240Meg version of this
>> Super
>>> Floppy as well.
>>
>> Yes, and the documentation says that ide-floppy handles them as well.
>>
>> My guess is that you need to unload floppy.ko as well as load
>> ide-floppy.ko. Both are likely to use the same ID’s, which means that
>> floppy.ko is in command even if ide-floppy.ko is loaded. Because most
>> of the world uses no floppy drives at all with standard floppy drives
>> in second place, I would expect the wrong one to be loaded by default.
>>
>> Why are you so quick to blame some conspiracy when we have not yet
>> ruled out simple operational problems?
>>
>
> Who said anything about conspiracy, I’m talking about bugs due to lack
> of regression testing. This is an all-too-common problem with community
> efforts.
>
> I have a physical 3.5" floppy drive as drive A and an IDE Super Floppy
> installed on this machine. Back when I ran XP this combination ran
> fine. It runs fine when I physically boot FreeDOS, and it ran fine
> under Ubuntu.
>
> All of this hardware was present on the machine when I ran the OpenSuSE
> install. The install found it all and did not install the correct
> drivers. (OK, the floppy wasn’t there during the first install of
> OpenSuSE 11.1 because I wanted to document it, but I’ve had 3 other
> fresh installs since then and all hardware was present.)
>
> How do I “force unload” floppy form the boot sequence? Doesn’t HAL got
> out at boot and look for devices and match them up with drivers?
>
> A busted HAL would explain why the install was busted and the problem
> didn’t sweep itself up. If, as you say, floppy is assuming it can
> handle ALL floppy drives, when it clearly cannot. If Linux follows the
> traditional PC hardware check path, floppy drives would be checked prior
> to MFM, SCSI, then IDE, EIDE, SATA.
If you do a ‘sudo /sbin/modprobe -rv floppy’ followed by ‘sudo
/sbin/modprobe -v ide-floppy’, does it work?
Once we have tested that, I’ll tell you how to keep floppy from
loading and how to force the loading of ide-floppy when you boot.
I think this driver is actively maintained because its name is changed
in 2.6.30.
roland@linux-j7oz:~> sudo /sbin/modprobe -rv floppy
root’s password:
rmmod /lib/modules/2.6.27.23-0.1-default/kernel/drivers/block/floppy.ko
roland@linux-j7oz:~> sudo /sbin/modprobe -v ide-floppy
roland@linux-j7oz:~>
Oh, no change in using a Super Floppy. Two chirps and no mount. A 1.44 works just like it did.
seasoned geek wrote:
> Oh, no change in using a Super Floppy. Two chirps and no mount. A 1.44
> works just like it did.
I’ve gone as far as I can. The person that committed the latest
version of the driver is Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz
<bzolnier@gmail.com>. Perhaps he can help you.
I sent an email to them asking them to view this thread and look into the issue.
I believe this may not be a driver problem, but a HAL (or whatever does the hardware scan at boot) loading the floppy driver, then not replacing it with the ide-floppy driver when the LS120 is encountered. I know you had me manually replacing some things, but I’m not convinced a manual replacement after the fact changes things.
seasoned geek wrote:
> lwfinger;2006076 Wrote:
>> seasoned geek wrote:
>>> Oh, no change in using a Super Floppy. Two chirps and no mount. A
>> 1.44
>>> works just like it did.
>>
>> I’ve gone as far as I can. The person that committed the latest
>> version of the driver is Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz
>> <bzolnier@gmail.com>. Perhaps he can help you.
>
> I sent an email to them asking them to view this thread and look into
> the issue.
>
> I believe this may not be a driver problem, but a HAL (or whatever does
> the hardware scan at boot) loading the floppy driver, then not replacing
> it with the ide-floppy driver when the LS120 is encountered. I know you
> had me manually replacing some things, but I’m not convinced a manual
> replacement after the fact changes things.
It does! The initial scan is based on PCI ID’s, which is why floppy,
rather than ide-floppy, is loaded at boot. If you want to try it the
other way, blacklist floppy and add ide-floppy to the modules loaded
at boot.
Well, I got the following response from the person you pointed me towards:
openSUSE is using libata drivers for all PATA hardware so libata Maintainer
would be more suitable person to contact about this issue (also please use
linux-ide@vger.kernel.org mailing list for communication if possible).
I tried to send email to that address requesting they read this thread, and it bounced. Sounds a lot like
“Na my yob man”
I tried to one-up you by opening the case and unhooking the cable to the floppy drive, then rebooting.
roland@linux-j7oz:~> lsmod | grep floppy
ide_floppy 14344 0
floppy 62936 0
ide_core 115068 4 ide_floppy,ide_scsi,ide_pci_generic,amd74xx
roland@linux-j7oz:~>
So, How do I black list the floppy driver to keep it from reloading on boot? Please also post instructions on how to un-black list it in case holding the driver out simply removes all floppy support.
I found out how to blacklist and did it. That only achieved making the floppy drive not work. The LS120 still will only read a 1.44Meg floppy.
I’m going to play around with some “live” CD/DVD things and make certain all is well. I’m also going to try a second LS120 I have here in case this is a firmware thing. It is starting to look like someone removed the LS120 support from the driver though. I tried a much newer version of Ubuntu and it shows up as a SCSI drive, refusing to mount anything other than a floppy as well.
We need to find “where” someone decided to “clean up the code” by removing support for these drives. The problem has nothing to do with the floppy driver. Right now the possibilities appear to be as follows:
the BIOS on my MB somehow dropped support for it without telling the outside world,
the driver dropped support for it
BOTH drives and all 50+ disks I have here are bad.
I’m going to poke around with System Rescue CD, FreeDOS, and a few other things I have here. Might even play with an old version of commercial SuSE if I can get it to run without trying to install.
This is a real p*sser.
It shouldn’t take 3 days to get a super floppy working.
seasoned geek wrote:
> I found out how to blacklist and did it. That only achieved making the
> floppy drive not work. The LS120 still will only read a 1.44Meg floppy.
>
> I’m going to play around with some “live” CD/DVD things and make
> certain all is well. I’m also going to try a second LS120 I have here
> in case this is a firmware thing. It is starting to look like someone
> removed the LS120 support from the driver though. I tried a much newer
> version of Ubuntu and it shows up as a SCSI drive, refusing to mount
> anything other than a floppy as well.
>
> We need to find “where” someone decided to “clean up the code” by
> removing support for these drives. The problem has nothing to do with
> the floppy driver. Right now the possibilities appear to be as follows:
>
> 1) the BIOS on my MB somehow dropped support for it without telling the
> outside world,
>
> 2) the driver dropped support for it
>
> 3) BOTH drives and all 50+ disks I have here are bad.
>
> I’m going to poke around with System Rescue CD, FreeDOS, and a few
> other things I have here. Might even play with an old version of
> commercial SuSE if I can get it to run without trying to install.
>
> This is a real p*sser.
>
> It shouldn’t take 3 days to get a super floppy working.
Don’t forget about opening a bug report in Novell’s bugzilla. I know, I
know… it’s a bit (well, in fact is very :-P) annoying but openSUSE
kernel developers are there and they can take a look on this issue and
putting you on the right path.
There is also a kernel specific-stuff list that I recommend for you to
visit:
http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-kernel/
Greetings,
–
Camaleón
seasoned geek wrote:
> lwfinger;2006192 Wrote:
>> seasoned geek wrote:
>>> lwfinger;2006076 Wrote:
>>>> seasoned geek wrote:
>>>>> Oh, no change in using a Super Floppy. Two chirps and no mount.
>> A
>>>> 1.44
>>>>> works just like it did.
>>>> I’ve gone as far as I can. The person that committed the latest
>>>> version of the driver is Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz
>>>> <bzolnier@gmail.com>. Perhaps he can help you.
>>> I sent an email to them asking them to view this thread and look
>> into
>>> the issue.
>>>
>>> I believe this may not be a driver problem, but a HAL (or whatever
>> does
>>> the hardware scan at boot) loading the floppy driver, then not
>> replacing
>>> it with the ide-floppy driver when the LS120 is encountered. I know
>> you
>>> had me manually replacing some things, but I’m not convinced a
>> manual
>>> replacement after the fact changes things.
>>
>> It does! The initial scan is based on PCI ID’s, which is why floppy,
>> rather than ide-floppy, is loaded at boot. If you want to try it the
>> other way, blacklist floppy and add ide-floppy to the modules loaded
>> at boot.
>
>
> Well, I got the following response from the person you pointed me
> towards:
>
>
> openSUSE is using libata drivers for all PATA hardware so libata
> Maintainer
> would be more suitable person to contact about this issue (also please
> use
> linux-ide@vger.kernel.org mailing list for communication if possible).
The appropriate section from the MAINTAINERS list is
IDE/ATAPI DRIVERS
P: Borislav Petkov
M: petkovbb@gmail.com
L: linux-ide@vger.kernel.org
S: Maintained
F: Documentation/cdrom/ide-cd
F: drivers/ide/ide-cd*
I am not surprised at the “do not contact me directly” response, but I
was not sure which maintainer was appropriate.
I don’t know what happened with the mailing list. I just sent a
message that went through without error. Typo?
Do you have the .inf file for the Windows driver available? It might
shed some clues on how the OS detects the drive.
Please send me a Private Message with your E-mail address. I’m assuming that you would prefer not to list it here.
I posted on the linux-ide mailing list and have gotten a couple of replies. One from Alan Cox said:
Basically four content free pages. Ignoring all the stuff about HAL the hardware is detected and the drive reports that the media type is not supported.
That all appears to be working beautifully, although I’ve no idea why the media type is not supported - I wonder if something is trying to read the wrong block sizes or if the LS120 has some magic no standard bits.
Unfortunately they are very very obscure hardware."
As you see, he doesn’t think much of your ranting, nor the quality of the questions that we have asked.
Please send me the output of ‘uname -r’ for your system. I’m going to add some printouts to that driver to see why the driver doesn’t like your media, but I will need the exact version of your kernel.
Larry
The message didn’t go through because I have KMail set to send HTML rather than the archaic text-only format.
I can send private email of a self extracting file which contains all of the DOS driver information, but nothing for Windows.
Thanks for all of your help. I’m not surprised the list wasn’t much help. The hardware isn’t “obscure”, back in the 1990s it was wide spread. Last time I looked at sales stats, there were more SuperDisks sold than floppies…I guess everybody still has old AOL floppies to use up.
I’m through wasting time shooting the problem. I know what they did. They broke support for the MAT****A LS-120 drives. I managed to get everything working with my Compaq branded MITSUBISHI LS-120.
MATA was eventually purchased by Panasonic and Panasonic put out a much better version of the LS-120. Many people mistakenly think that a MATA LS-120 is a Panasonic LS-120. They require completely different drivers. Panasonic changed the firmware dramatically because they were also building a hot-swappable LS-120 for their notebooks. The MAT****A firmware wasn’t Plug & Pray compatible.
If one of the developers wants the MATA, they simply need to send me a snail mail address off-line and I will ship it to them. Will even include a couple of brand new LS-120 disks so they can test to their heart’s content. In the mean time, I have a functioning solution. I simply need to surf the Web to find another Compaq or Panasonic branded IDE LS-120. The Gateway/MATA branded drives are all over the place, but they aren’t going to work with the current software.
Of course, we were able to determine this because we bothered to walk down the entire “4 content free pages”. It also helped that I have spent over 20 years in IT developing fault tolerant applications, something which cannot be done with either Windows or Linux.