corrupt floppy driver?

[mark hilliard]

In article <4752 at segue.segue.com> jim at segue.segue.com (Jim Balter) writes:
>In article <1990Nov20.160931.22784 at mercury.cair.du.edu> tjreynol at zephyr.cair.du.edu (Tim) writes:
>>We have reason to believe our floopy driver is bogus.
>
>RTFM in regard to devices and drivers, and then you'll understand why we're all
>laughing.  Even if /dev/rdsk/f1q15dt were the floopy [sic] driver,


/dev/rdsk/f1q15dt IS a valid special device for Interactive, in fact it is 	(under a DOS description) drive B: and a 1.2 meg device.  Dont be so hard
on the guy.  We all had to learn about mknod one time or another, and what
better place than here to share our problems and frustrations?

You are right though, we would like to hear all of your symptoms before we
tie up net band width with fixes that may not apply.

Chances are that there is nothing wrong with the file in question, but rather
with the kernal, or even hardware, but if the file is gone then there is a way.
Look up mknod in you man and follow the instructions found there for rebuilding
your special files.  At the end of this post I will put an example of how it
works, but read the man before you try anything.  If you do a
ls -ol /dev/rdsk/f1q15dt you will find the major and minor numbers listed that
will be used for arguments to mknod ie:

crw-rw-rw-   6 root       1,  1 Mar 28  1990 f1q15dt
crw-rw-rw-   3 root       1, 81 Mar 28  1990 f1q18dt

                          ^  ^
__________________________|__|  

Remember, you must have both BLOCK AND CHARACTER entries for each drive. The
ls listing above is for char, you can find block in /dev/dsk/???????.

 ********************************************************************
 #
 #  Make device entries for the 1.44 meg floppy and set permissions
 #  THIS IS NEEDED FOR 1.06 ONLY ALL NEWER VERSIONS COME DONE
 #
 if (test ! -w /dev/dsk/f1q18dt) then
	 echo
	 echo Making Block device entries for 1.44meg floppy
	 mknod /dev/dsk/f1q18dt b 1 81
	 mknod /dev/dsk/f1q18d b 1 85
	 chmod 666 /dev/dsk/f1q18*

   else
   echo
   echo Block  device entries for 1.44meg floppy already done
 fi

 if (test ! -w /dev/rdsk/f1q18dt) then
	echo

        echo
	echo Making Char device entries for 1.44meg floppy
	mknod /dev/rdsk/f1q18dt c 1 81
	mknod /dev/rdsk/f1q18d c 1 85
	chmod 666 /dev/rdsk/f1q18*
   else
	echo
	echo Char device entries for 1.44meg floppy already done
	echo


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|  Mark Hilliard, N2HHR                         |    AWK is not just a   |
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