Subject: Re: formatting usb floppy?
To: Gary Thorpe <gathorpe79@yahoo.com>
From: Steven M. Bellovin <smb@research.att.com>
List: current-users
Date: 01/13/2003 23:00:56
In message <20030114032305.9934.qmail@web41207.mail.yahoo.com>, Gary Thorpe wri
tes:
> --- Bryan P <u5@terran.org> wrote: > On the distinguished day of Jan
>13, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:
>> 
>> > In message <20030113232839.GA10442@bcd.geek.com.au>, Daniel
>> Carosone writes:
>> > >I have a usb floppy drive, which is smaller and neater than the
>> > >modular-bay one for my laptop.  Apart from other issues I'm having
>> with
>> > >this specific drive (i can read but not write) I'm curious how to
>> format
>> > >floppies in such devices.
>> ...
>> > >Is there an "official" answer?  It's not something I need to do
>> > >right now, but seems to be a functional gap at the moment.
>> > >
>> > >The drive is sd0 at atapibus1 drive 0: <TEAC, FD-05PUB, 1026> disk
>> removable
>> >
>> > I've experienced the same problem, and posted about it.  No one has
>> > suggested any solutions.  I can usually read from the drive, but I
>> can
>> > never write to it.
>> 
>> Me three.  What I've been doing in the mean-time is using dd to copy
>> out a
>> disk image of a freshly formatted disk.
>> 
>> -bp
>> --
>> # Software Engineer
>> 
>>
>
>How would other removeable media SCSI devices be formatted ordinarily?
>Would it work for this?
>
>
>[If dd actually works, then it would seem writes are possible....]
>

I've never tried formatting it, but I've never gotten any writes to 
work.  I was about to try 'dd', but when I plugged the drive in, I ran 
afoul of another oft-discussed USB bug:  it printed the 'umass0' stuff, 
but not the 'sd0' part.  (There was a suggestion that I should disable 
ATAPI over umass.  That didn't solve the problem.)


		--Steve Bellovin, http://www.research.att.com/~smb (me)
		http://www.wilyhacker.com (2nd edition of "Firewalls" book)