Xenix console error message problem

[Alayne McGregor]

I have an application that accesses the floppy disk drive. Within
it I would like to verify that a disk is in the drive and the door is
closed. Once I get to _that_ point, I can easily enough verify the
format and integrity of the data on the floppy.

At present, XENIX insists on dumping a nasty error message to
the console device if a process tries to read the floppy drive and
no disk is present, or the door is closed:
-----
Fri Aug 18 15:35:23

fd: ERROR: error on dev floppy (2/64), block=0 cmd=00000000 status=00000003
	insert disk or close floppy door
-----
...not exactly the type of message I want the user to see, barfed all
over the middle of the window she is looking at!

The error message is output by the kernel (driver) before the read() call
to read the floppy returns.

OK, so how do I stop the kernel from barfing error messages onto the
current multiscreen (which the /dev/console device is apparently mapped
to) ? 

I tried changing the major/minor device numbers for both /dev/console
and /dev/systty, from 3/1 to that of disabled multiscreen tty12: 0/11,
then rebooting. The error message was still dumped to the currently
displayed multiscreen.

Another solution to this problem would be link in and access a
(fragment) of a floppy driver that doesn't spit out nasty error messages,
but which is capable of returning a drive status.

I am running XENIX 2.3.1 on a 386 machine.
Thanks for any suggestions.

Brett Delmage
<scs|dgbt>!gandalf!jsitcom!brett