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#1 2005-09-15 01:44:23

Gullible Jones
Member
Registered: 2004-12-29
Posts: 4,863

Formatting floppies always fscks up

I'm going to be needing the Arch installer soon, so I'm using a 3 floppies and the images from ftp.archlinux.org/images... But I've hit a bit of a brick wall: whenever I format a floppy using fdformat, I get bad blocks on it, and it becomes unmountable. Since it's in vfat format, there's no way to fsck it... And if I put in a Windows box and try to format it, Windows reports that it is corrupted.

And you know what's really strange? If I format the floppy in ext2, the corruption disappears, and the floppy is mountable once more.

Is this a known bug in fdformat? And is possible to circumvent it by booting from ext2-formatted, or will my machine not see them without a bootloader?

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#2 2005-09-15 01:59:15

Snowman
Developer/Forum Fellow
From: Montreal, Canada
Registered: 2004-08-20
Posts: 5,212

Re: Formatting floppies always fscks up

When I did my Arch floppies, I used rawwritewin under Windows.

Under Linux, use dd. Read the man pages to get the right options. You don't need to format the floppy *I think*.

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#3 2005-09-15 02:30:59

Gullible Jones
Member
Registered: 2004-12-29
Posts: 4,863

Re: Formatting floppies always fscks up

Doesn't work. If I don't format them I get I/O errors. If I do, it usually results in floppies that refuse to mount (no matter what) with a complaint about bad superblock or wrong FS type (even when the FS type is explicitly specified).

Also, the ext2-formatted floppies (made with mke2fs) are not mountable after the images have been written to them (though they mount fine before that).

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#4 2005-09-15 02:46:38

Snowman
Developer/Forum Fellow
From: Montreal, Canada
Registered: 2004-08-20
Posts: 5,212

Re: Formatting floppies always fscks up

Hmmm... Maybe there's a physical defect on the floppies.  Did you try to use other ones?  Maybe try to boot with them.

Otherwise, I don't know. For me, it worked out of the box using  rawwritewin.

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#5 2005-09-15 09:29:04

Gullible Jones
Member
Registered: 2004-12-29
Posts: 4,863

Re: Formatting floppies always fscks up

Checked when I selected the floppies... I'd been getting the problems before, you see, and thought bad disks were to blame. These floppies are not bad, or at least weren't when I started.

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#6 2005-09-15 19:07:35

Gullible Jones
Member
Registered: 2004-12-29
Posts: 4,863

Re: Formatting floppies always fscks up

Ah ha... Well, here's one thing I've discovered: low-level formatting of floppies seems to have a greater than 70% chance of corrupting them permanently. :shock: Why the hell is it "standard"?

(Also seems to be the case in Windows - which is really bad, because Windows has to do a low-level format to change the filesystem on a floppy, at least in Win9x.)

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