Re: 2.88 Meg Floppy Woes

[<eranian@chorus.fr>]

> 
> We are running Linux on an IBM ThinkPad 750Cs with a 2.88 Meg floppy
> drive.  I had no problem getting the machine to boot the Linux Slackware
> 2.1 kernel (1.1.59) and installing all 75 (or so) diskettes via the
> setup program.  
> 
> However, when I try to use the floppy drive to move other files onto the
> machine (such as the PCMCIA drivers for the modem and ethernet card), I
> cannot get the floppy drive to work properly.  I have tried putting the
> files on a DOS diskette and using mcopy, but I get disk I/O errors.  I
> also tried using "mount" but the kernel loses its sanity when I try to
> copy files to the floppy (either it says the file system is read-only or
> that /dev/fd0 is not a valid mount point).
> 
> Does anyone have a clue as to how to fix this problem?  It appears to be
> something wrong with the driver for the 2.88 drive since our old version
> of Linux which used a hacked floppy driver which told the kernel that
> the 2.88 Meg drive was really a 1.44 Meg drive did not suffer from these
> problems.
> 

Hello Robert,

IN fact, you can't run the vanilla slackware boot disks on 750 without
a especially patched kernel version. Such a bootable disk is available
on the net. I recommend you to read the html page  from Ian Jackson
at http://peipa.essex.ac.uk/html/linux-thinkpad.html and retrieved
the boot disks from there.

Best regards,




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 St'ephane ERANIAN			| Email	eranian@chorus.fr
 Universit'e PARIS VII			|	eranian@litp.ibp.fr
 LITP - Laboratoire d'Informatique	|
 Th'eorique et Programmation		|
 2 place Jussieu			|
 75251 Paris cedex 05			|
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