[CentOS] Re: Mounting Floppies

[Nigel Kendrick]

-----Original Message-----
From: centos-bounces at centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces at centos.org] On Behalf
Of William L. Maltby
Sent: Friday, June 20, 2008 7:03 PM
To: CentOS mailing list
Subject: Re: [CentOS] Re: Mounting Floppies

On Fri, 2008-06-20 at 11:54 -0500, Robert Nichols wrote:
> Nigel Kendrick wrote:
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: centos-bounces at centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces at centos.org] On
Behalf
> > Of Ralph Angenendt
> ><sent>

> > Nigel Kendrick wrote:
> >><snip>

> You've tried replacing the drive, and the disk works in your USB floppy
drive,
> so about all that's left are the cable and the floppy controller on the
> motherboard.  Probably not much you can do about the latter.

HAH! Oh ye of little faith! You severely underestimate the number of
creative ways the "hoomon" can befuddle hisself!

Based on experience - NOT mine, of course 8-O - the power cable
mentioned in my other post may be bad, the connectors often are not
keyed and the cable may be backwards on one end or the other, older
re-used cables may have micro-fractures (from overuse of their flexible
properties), the jumpers on the floppy (if present) that select
different operating and configurations may be messed up, ...

Well that's all I can think of at the monument (sic).




...Hm, but you are forgetting I have tried this on two separate machines -
unfortunately both of which have recently been gifted with CentOS 5 where
before they ran 4.x. One of the machines had been sitting idle for about 2
months until I decided to revamp it with bigger drives and install CentOS 5.
For the first install the floppy was working because I used it to install
drivers for the RAID card - just as I was trying to do this time round

...and before you think I may have disturbed the innards, the old/new drives
are in caddies so I only opened up the machine to swap out the floppy drive
when I experienced problems. One server is an Acer G703 and the other has an
Intel dual Xeon board in it so it's not motherboard-related. 

Multiple, coincidental failures? Maybe - I think I'll boot the new server on
an old version of Knoppix and see what happens....