Since this is occurring on an NEC PC-9821Bf, I'm not sure how applicable
this is to i386, but here goes.

JFTR, before and after trying with NetBSD/pc98 1.4.3_ALPHA, I formatted
the same disk using MSDOS's "format /5."  On MSDOS 3.3C, both read and
write to the floppy disk worked fine, i.e., I believe the physical media
is okay.

How this all started was that I was using a 2HC (1.2MB 2HD, 512 bytes,
80tracks, 15sectors/track) 3.5" disk which I had formated on a DOS machine.
I've been using the disk for quite some time, but up until yesterday only
for reading.  When I tried to write to the disk using the `cp` command, it
failed with errors looking something like "hard error writing to fsbn
2011(st0 40 <abnormal> st1 4 ..."

Another problem I see besides the actual writing failure itself is that
the machine tries again and again ceaselessly, and there seems to be no
way to stop it from accessing the floppy drive, short of pushing the
hardware reset button.  At least ^C, ^Z andr ^G had no effect in stopping it.

Anyway, after getting the machine "back to normal," I re-mounted the
floppy.  I could still read it, and went ahead and copied all the files
to the NetBSD machine.  I then formatted the disk using the command:
`/usr/sbin/fdc -f -d hc /dev/rfd0d`.  I couldn't use the resulting disk
on either a NetBSD machine or a DOS machine, not even to read.

I have lots of questions like should I be using "fdformat," is there
another "newfs" step I have to take, and what device should I be using
(fd0a, fd0c, fd0d, etc.), but I don't have enough knowledge to really
know where the problem lies.

Hoping for comments.  TIA.

henry nelson