[ale] ls120 drive (fwd)

[Chris Ricker]

I'm re-forwarding this to the ale list because the last half of Geoffrey's
message (all the errors and such) showed up on the copy sent to me, but not
on the copy sent to ALE.  I've reformatted it a little so it shouldn't get
truncated by the mail-server.

The limit of my knowledge about LS-120 is that there is a kernel driver for
it, so I assume you want to use that ;-).  Other than that, I don't know....
Maybe someone else has fought one and won?

later,
chris

--
Chris Ricker                                 gt1355b at prism.gatech.edu

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 08 Jan 1998 08:05:07 -0500
 From: Geoffrey Myers <geof at abraxis.com>
To: gt1355b at prism.gatech.edu, ale <ale at cc.gatech.edu>
Subject: Re: [ale] ls120 drive

Chris Ricker wrote:
> 
> On  8 Jan, Geoffrey Myers wrote:
> > I recently purchased a Digital Research ls120 drive.  I've got it
> > installed, it's recognized by my kernel, (with some funky messages) and
> > I can mount it and write to it as a vfat disk.  I attempted to fdisk it,
> > which appeared to work and then attempted to format it.  The format took
> > forever, never completed and I couldn't kill it.  In other words,
> > unsuccessful.  I've not found any references to this in the kernel docs
> > or the HOWTO's.  I'm running 2.0.33.  Anyone else played with one of
> > these puppies.  I had hoped I would eventually get rid of my standard
> > 3.5 drive, but not until I could boot linux from this puppy.
> 
> Did you enable "Include IDE/ATAPI floppy support" or something to that
> effect (in the block device section) when you compiled your kernel?

I'm sending this to the ale list as I've added some more specifics
regarding kernel messages.

Yeah, I missed it the first time and the kernel puts out a nice message
indicating that it found the drive, but that there's no support in the
kernel for it.  I then went back and rebuilt with this item 'selected.' 
I get a couple of strings of kernel stuff regarding the drive, but some
of them seem to be possible problems, here is what I get:

hdc: LS-120 COSM 02 UHD Floppy, ATAPI FLOPPY drive
<stuff>
ide-floppy: hdc: I/O error, pc = 5a, key =  5, asc = 24, ascq =  0
ide-floppy: Can't get drive capabilities
hdc: 123264kB, 963/8/32 CHS, 533 kBps, 512 sector size, 720 rpm
hdc: The drive reports both 126222336 and 0 bytes as its capacity

The 'I/O error,' 'Can't get drive capabilities' and 'drive reports both
126222336 and 0  bytes as its capacity' messages don't give me the warm
and fuzzies.  I would expect it to report two different capacities, but
it appears that it recognizes the 120M and not the 1.4.  I've mounted a
dos 120M and and it appears to work fine.

The main problem was that I wanted to format them ext2 and this doesn't
seem to work.  The only reference I found to being able to do this, was
on a page that discussed booting from a ls120.  It indicated that you
would probably want to have a ext2 formatted ls120 to boot from, so this
tells me that I should be able to do it.  The wierd thing is that the
fdisk process and mkfs process seem to work.  The fdisk completes,
although it takes a long time, longer than fdisk on a parallel zip
drive.  mkfs appears to complete, I get the final message, but my prompt
never returns and uptime just continues to grow.  I'm not able to kill
the mkfs process and when I rebooted to kill the process, I had to
execute shutdown two or three times.

-- 
Until later: Geoffrey		geof at abraxis.com

NT is secure.... as long as you don't remove the shrink wrap.