Floppy formatting and using

[Michael Grenier]

>From article <435 at zinn.MV.COM>, by mem at zinn.MV.COM (Mark E. Mallett):
> I'm having the dangdest time using floppies on my Microport Sys V/AT
> system (v 2.4).  When I first installed the thing, v 2.2, I did floppy
> backups frequently without incident.  Now, I'll format a floppy
> (/etc/format /dev/rdsk/fd096), and 9 times out of 10, I'll get write
> errors trying to use it.  Subsequent attempts to write to the disk

I had the same problem (though not 9 out 10 times) making multivolume
backups nearly impossible. One possible problem seems to be doing the 
formatting when lot of other things are going on like serial interrupts.

Anyway, I grew tired of the problem and wrote a floppy handler which
works off the end of a pipe, .i.e  ls|cpio -ocv|dbundle /dev/rdsk/fd ...

The code is based on W. Davidson's posting of bundle/unbundle which breaks
up the standard input across multiple volumes but my version will read
after write on every track and retry if it failed. It also formats the 
floppy automatically should it run into unrecoverable errors and prompt
for new diskettes at the end of each volume or to replace a diskette
that's being difficult.

It can be used with cpio , tar, or most anything.

If there is enough requests, I'll post otherwise by email.

    -Mike Grenier
     mike at cimcor.mn.org