Martin Husemann wrote:

> I could format them on another machine (different floppy, different OS)
> and write to them without any problems on NetBSD.
> 
> I'm not sure my floppy drive has ever been used before in this millenium.
> Using old drives on old floppies - I wouldn't expect anything but failure.

The floppy disks are not exactly new, that's right. I estimate about
5 or 6 years old. The drives I used are a) brandnew (2002) and b) also about
6 or 7 years old.

I had no problem formatting them on the same machine with the same drive
with Windows and have just used a Linux system-on-a-floppy (tomsrtbt)
to format about 20 disks. I had 3 errors with Linux and retired those disks.
That's what I would have expected: some bad disks. But with NetBSD I could
not use fdformat successfully for a single disk and that makes me think,
there might be a problem hiding somewhere.

ciao
     Klaus