Floppy disks don't work with FreeBSD 9.0

[Eivind Evensen]

On Sat, Mar 17, 2012 at 09:59:39AM -0400, Thomas Laus wrote:
> List:
> 
> I keep archival floppy disk copies of EPROM images on CDROM and occasionally 
> need to DD them back to a floppy disk for my programmer to load.  I recently 
> upgraded two of my shop computers from FreeBSD 7 Stable to FreeBSD 9 Stable 
> with clean installs.  I tried the 'fdformat' command prior to 'dd' of the 
> image file yesterday.  All of my floppy disks showed errors on all tracks.  I 
> used a ^C to abort the command and the PC dropped core.  I used the same 
> disks on my laptop with OpenBSD 5 and everything worked as expected.  I was 
> able to format and diskdupe the image to them.  I looked over the Release 
> Notes for FreeBSD 9 and there wasn't any mention of eliminating floppy disk 
> support on either FreeBSD 8 or 9.  This happened on two different PC's, both 
> running FreeBSD 9.  The hardware isn't suspect because these same two PC's 
> were able to format and dupe images when running FreeBSD 7.

For what it's worth, I had problems writing images back to a
floppy disk at around 8.0 prerelease. Dd wrote the image ok,
but when closing the device, the machine panicked. Problem is
gone on 8.2 and 8.3 (prerelease), and I haven't tried 9 yet.

-- 
Eivind