OT: click-click in floppy disk drive

[Polytropon]

On Wed, 23 Oct 2013 08:41:25 -0400, Jerry wrote:
> I have an old portable "floppy drive
> -1.44" somewhere, I would have to find it, that I could plug into the
> serial port if required.

You mean "serial port" as "RS-232 9 pin connector"? PCs that
don't have floppy disk drives usually also don't have serial
ports anymore (the same like parallel ports that have disappeared
many years ago).

On very rare occassions, to be honest, every few years, I have
to access systems that can only process 1.44" floppies for
(small amount) data exchange - no USB ports, no network, no
nothing. For this really exceptional case I have a USB floppy
drive. I hope that at least _sometimes_ using it will keep
the drive alive until the "target system" does a favour to
the world (including me) and finally stops working. But you
know: Never touch a running system... :-)



> It use to work on Windows.

Only as long as there is a working driver support! ;-)



> I never even
> attempted to try it on FreeBSD.

I've tested with a USB floppy disk drive, and it is supported.
The device will appear as a normal direct access drive (/dev/da?).



> I wonder if anyone is still using the
> old ZIP drives. There was a serious problem with them and the "Click of
> Death" situation.

Oh, that kind of nasty "hardware virus" where a misaligned drive
could "infect" ZIP media that would then misalign any further
drive they've been put into? I haven't been using ZIP drives
myself, I know they existed for external SCSI, parallel and
maybe even USB (and of course internal ATA) connections, but
as far as I know, they didn't leave behind any significant
footprint in IT history. (At least they were very rare here
in Germany.)



-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...