Chapter 5. Using Floppy Disks
Prev Oxygen Developer's Guide Next

Chapter 5. Using Floppy Disks

Table of Contents

Large Nonstandard Floppy Disk Device Files
Creating a Large Floppy Disk
Creating a Disk Image on Disk
Verifying a Disk
Tricks to Gain Even More Space on a Floppy
Preparing a Large Floppy Disk for Booting with LRP
Warnings about Large Floppy Disks
Common Floppy Disk Problems and Their Solutions
Problem: I/O Errors on Mount
Problem: Many I/O Errors on Sectors 19 and 20
Problem: Minix Filesystem Not Found
Problem: root.lrp Fails to Load
Problem: Unable to mount root fs

Large Nonstandard Floppy Disk Device Files

Before large floppy disks can be used under LRP, there must be device files for them. Most current releases have these; however, if not, this is how they are created:[8]

mknod /dev/fd0u1680 b 2 44 1.68M
mknod /dev/fd0u1722 b 2 60 1.72M
mknod /dev/fd0u1743 b 2 76 1.74M
mknod /dev/fd0u2880 b 2 32 2.88M

The technical details of several different floppy sizes are below[9] ; for most this can be skipped without adverse effects:

DeviceMajor Device NumberMinor Device NumberCylindersHeadsSectors
/dev/fd0u1440 22880218
/dev/fd0u1600 212480220
/dev/fd0u1680 24480221
/dev/fd0u1722 26082221
/dev/fd0u1743 27683221
/dev/fd0u1760 29680222
dev/fd0u1840 211680223
/dev/fd0u1940 210080224
/dev/fd0u2880232unknown2unknown

The disk device files with ‘D’, ‘H’, and ‘E’ in the names (for the 3.5" disk formats) are no longer used. [10] Some distributions may not have any of these device files, in which case they will have to be created.


[8] Ray Olszewski (LRP mailing list, 3 September 2000, 22:14:09)

[9] Ibid.

[10] Linux 2.2.18 kernel documentation: linux/Documentation/devices.txt.

Prev Up Next
Problem Solving Home Creating a Large Floppy Disk