floppies & linux

[Kevin Buettner]

On Jan 31,  2:13pm, der.hans wrote:

> generally I just don't use floppies for anything, but today I'd like to
> build some boot floppies.
> 
> Anyway, I've not had much success to using floppies with linux over the
> last couple of years. I just presumed it was because my drives were bad,
> but I'm now using brand new drives in rack mount systems, so they should
> be OK.
> 
> Anyway, does everyone else have probs with floppies? Any secrets to
> getting these puppies to work reliably?

On one of my machines a couple years ago, I thought the floppy drive
had died on me.  No matter what floppy I used, I was getting errors,
both reading and writing.

I ended up taking it apart and borrowing the floppy drive from
one of my other machines.  I eventually discovered that the old
(presumably broken drive) started working again.  The drive had
accumulated quite a lot of dust over the years and just knocking
it about while taking it apart dislodged enough of it to make it
work again.  (At least that's my theory.)  I took a vacuum cleaner
to it shortly thereafter.  (Do be careful with vacuum cleaners
around electronic components though - they generate a lot of
static electricity.)

I don't use floppies much anymore.  I used to use them all the
time for boot disks for experimental kernels, but I've come to
trust my skills with using lilo enough that I no longer bother
with them.

Kevin