Hi Howard,

  >   This looks even worse than the current kludge. The correct solution
  >   is an auto-detecting fd-driver.
  > 
  > I agree. I wrote just such a driver for Minix 1.4 at least 8 years ago.
  > I'm apalled to see the world still using this approach. My driver would
  > also dynamically determine the number of sectors per track, thus supporting
  > the oddball ST formats like 10 or 11 sector tracks on double-density,
  > or 20-22 sector tracks on high density.

  I wonder if there would be some efficient method to determine the number
  of cylinders. The only thing I could come up with is to start at track 0
  and increase track number until the next track cannot be found. This is
  not exactly what I would call efficient...

I never gave this a great deal of thought. If you wanted to do this, it would
be a little faster (not much) to seek to track 41, and if found, seek to track
80, and then increment from there. I know of no one who ever used a 40 track
5-1/4" drive and formatted it to 41+ tracks, whereas 82 track 3-1/2" floppies
were pretty common. However, I figured 80 tracks was good enough.
  -- Howard