workaround for 2 floppy problem in V/386 3.0e

[Derek E. Terveer]

For those who care, I have struck upon a workaround for the problems that I was
encountering when using two floppies in Microport system V/386 3.0e.  The
problem was (and still is) specifically this:

	When two floppy drives are simultaneously mounted, performing a umount
	on one of them doesn't seem to always flush the superblock associatted
	with that floppy and the system does not seem to flag that device as
	having been unmounted.  Thus, subsequent accesses of that drive will
	read the previous floppy's superblock, with potentially disasterous
	results.  The floppy doesn't even have to be physically inserted for
	the os to think that there is indeed a floppy mounted!  Quite
	irritating.

My equipment, etc:

	ACER 1100 386/16MHz
	Microport System V/386-3.0e, limited
	Dos Merge 1.1, Limited
	~5.5 Mb memory
	1 * 72Mb Miniscribe drive
	1 * 1.2Mb floppy (drive 0)
	1 * 1.44Mb floppy (drive 1)

Work around:

	After umounting the desired floppy and *after* physically inserting the
	new floppy into the desired drive, but *before* mounting the new floppy
	fs, run "fsck -n /dev/dsk/????" to clear the superblock.  You may then
	safely mount the new fs.  You may, i believe, if you wish to feel
	safer, run the fsck command with the floppy drive door open, and then
	perform the mount after fsck aborts.
	I usually do something like the following:

		fsck -n /dev/dsk/f1; mount /dev/dsk/f1 /mnt/obj

derek
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Derek Terveer 	    det at hawkmoon.MN.ORG || ..!uunet!rosevax!elric!hawkmoon!det
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