Summary: | fdformat cannot format a floppy if it has physical errors. | ||
---|---|---|---|
Product: | Gentoo Linux | Reporter: | Aniruddha Shankar <k> |
Component: | [OLD] KDE | Assignee: | Gentoo Linux bug wranglers <bug-wranglers> |
Status: | RESOLVED WONTFIX | ||
Severity: | major | CC: | gnome |
Priority: | High | ||
Version: | unspecified | ||
Hardware: | x86 | ||
OS: | Linux | ||
Whiteboard: | |||
Package list: | Runtime testing required: | --- |
Description
Aniruddha Shankar
2003-04-14 14:22:56 UTC
The problem persists when I'm using a vanillla 2.4.20 kernel ... so this is not something localised to CK4 or because i'm using supermount *phew* hopefully someone out there can confirm this bug... Aniruddha Shankar Bangalore, India The problem is also present when using gfloppy, Gnome's floppy formatter. I'm ccing the gnome team on this as well (apologies if this is the inappropriate thing to do) Aniruddha Shankar Bangalore, India floppy is only a frontend, in this case for fdformat. The error message comes straight from fdformat and there's nothing we can do on the kfloppy side; this is not a kfloppy bug. This is the true extent of fdformat's capabilities and if I understand correctly the diskette cannot be used. (Can you make it usable with some means other than kfloppy?) The kfloppy interface and help is perhaps a little misleading if you don't know what's underneath and what it is capable of. But, there's nothing we can do about it. I thought as much because I get the same weird errors when using fdformat. However, there is a way to format the floppy successfully : 1. umount the floppy 2. mformat a: 3. dosfsck -waft /dev/fd0 this results in a floppy that can be used with confidence as the bad sectors are marked as such by dosfsck. To preclude the possibility that this is an error that is unique in some manner to my hardware / software configuration, could you please see if you could duplicate this bug (despite the fact that it's not, strictly speaking, a KDE bug) ? Assuming you can (and I have no reason to think that you will not be able to, as I have seen this bug arise in all versions of Gentoo from 1.1 to 1.4rc4) I would submit that this is a cause for concern in re KDE/Gnome as many newbies (especially in the third world where bad quality floppies are widely used) will encounter this bug. If I were to prepare a detailed bugreport, could you please submit that upstream to the maintainer of fdformat ? I'm asking because in my experience maintainers of packages pay more attention to bugreports from XXX@gentoo.org as opposed to randomuser@somplace.com Thanks a lot, Aniruddha Shankar Bangalore, India Well, as it happens, I use a laptop that has no builtin floppy drive, and have no floppies around. So I'm reopening this bugreport and giving it to the bug-wranglers again, who will assign it to whoever is responsible for fdformat. brain@gentoo.org has already verified this - he produed the same error by scratching a floppy on purpose and running fdformat. (Though it may not always be as easy to reproduce, because 'scratching a floppy' in't a very precise operation...) sorry, not a gentoo bug if you like, submit a official bug. this is where you can report only gentoo bug |