Re: gfloppy: Could not determine current format type

[Toralf Lund <toralf kscanners com>]

> [ snip ]
>
> It seems we all did it wrong. Hurry never is good. Lets forget it.
> </rant>

Agreed.

> > I would appreciate it if we could stop this discussion now, and if someone could
> > tell me why 'gfloppy' (the version from gnome-utils-1.2.0_helix_1) complains about
> > failure to determine current format when I'm trying to _completely_ reformat a
> > floppy (I don't know what format it has, or if it is formatted at all, and I don't
> > really care.)
>
> As I am not the gfloppy coder, so lets try to find the problem step by
> step:
>
> - can you format that floppy with other tools? Maybe the floppy is
> damaged, so no tool will be able to format it.
>
> - can you format other floppies with those other tools? Maybe the hw
> is damaged, so no tool will format floppies, and maybe even will "eat"
> them (I recently had to change one drive due this, read fine, but eat
> them when writting anything).
>
> - can you format other floppies with gfloppy? Maybe gfloppy is really
> the problem, and is unable to detect all kinds of floppies or floppy
> drives, for example.

Now, I finally got around to testing gfloppy again. This  time i tried some other
tools, too. The commands I tested were:


     mformat a:
     fdformat /dev/fd0
     fdformat /dev/fd0H1440

Of these, the first two failed - I've lost the message from mformat, but the fdformat
one was

     Could not determine current format type: No such device

i.e. really the same thing as for gfloppy. The last command, however, formatted the
floppy successfully, and (this is the interesting bit), after this, gfloppy started
working as expected. This also goes for mformat and the other variant of fdformat.

I'm unable to reproduce the problem completely using a different floppy, but I'm also
not able to fine one that's not (pre)formatted. I did get the fdformat error for some
other the disks, though, one of which I know had been used previously as a tar archive.

The conclusion? Well, I'm still confused, but I think I've seen some indications that
'gfloppy' is actually only able to format floppy disks that are formatted already,
which rather limits its usefulness.


- Toralf