5 inch floppies

[Michael Hennebry]

On Sat, 3 Sep 2005, fredex wrote:

> On Sat, Sep 03, 2005 at 10:55:28AM -0500, Michael Hennebry wrote:
> >
> > I'm trying to read some old (duh) 5 inch
> > floppies with a borrowed drive on an FC3 box.
> > Probabaly there is more than one format,
> > but I'm not sure which has which.
> > The usual result is that I can read the
> > directory by clicking on a KDE icon,
> > but get I/O errors when trying to read any of the files.
> > Trying to mount with a mount command also results
> > in an I/O error.
> > If I couldn't read the directory,
> > I'd suppose that I was out of luck.
> > Is there a reason that the directory
> > would be easier to read than the files?
> > Any ideas on how to read the files?
>
> It's possible that the floppies have many bad spots on them. My
> experience is that floppies that are years old have a tendency
> to become unreadable as time passes.

I threw out some unreadable ones of mine
years ago before 5 inch devices became rare.
It does seem strange that the directories
would be more readable than the files.

> As for how you are mounting them, assuming you've got the floppy
> drive listed in /etc/fstab, something like this:

>

It's pam-ed.  managed is one of the options.

>
> you should be able to do:
>

FC3 uses /media/floppy .


Is there a reason for the difference in
readability between the directory and other files?
Is there a reason that clicking would work,
but not an explicit mount?

Would it help to replace the fstab entry with something else?
If I change fstab , should I reboot?

--
Mike   hennebry at web.cs.ndsu.NoDak.edu
"There are three kinds of people,
those who can count and those who can't."