Re: identifying a floppy's filesystem type

From: Vilmos Soti (vilmos_at_vilmos.org)
Date: 06/15/04 

Date: 15 Jun 2004 10:57:24 -0700

Haines Brown <brownh@teufel.hartford-hwp.com> writes:

> Thanks. This rather long thread has at least brought together some
> issues regarding floppy recovery. I hestitate to extend it
> further. But perhaps one more question will be allowed.
>
> I assume the diskette is msdos. Although it may be a hopeless case, I
> can't proceed further with it because of another wrinkle, which it
> would be useful to clear up.

Get the first sector of the floppy and see what file says about it:

# dd if=/dev/fd0 of=floppy.mbr bs=512 count=1
# file floppy.mbr

This might identify the filesystem on the floppy.

> Based on experience, I have found that terminals can appear to be
> accessing a device even after they have cd to someplace else, so that
> I can't unmount a device until after I've killed the terminal. For
> that reason, I check to make sure I've not got a terminal somewhere
> that is blocking my efforts to mount or unmount.

Killing the terminal doesn't mean that programs running in it will
be killed, too. If the program is in "D" state, then they will
continue running, and eventually your only recourse is reboot.

> The ps aux reports that I have a [loop0] and a [loop1] process, each
> in a "SW<" state and is owned by root. When roots tries a kill -9 on
> them, it has no effect. What is a "SW<" process state? Why can't root
> kill them?

       S sleeping
       W has no resident pages
       < high-priority process

This was from ps(1).

> Root also has two processes named "mount /floppy" with a state of
> "D". When root tries to kill them, same result. I suspect, though that
> these are harmless enough and not the cause of my being out of sync
> with respect to mounting a floppy.

This is your problem. The "D" state means that the operating system
issued a command to the hardware, and the hardware didn't answer back
yet. It might happen because the answer takes long time, or, possibly
in your case, because the hardware is confused or faulty. The "D"
state is harmful in that sense that the given hardware cannot be used
until the "D" state is over in the given process. However, if the
process stays in "D" state, and you need the hardware, then the
only thing you can do is to reboot the computer.

Vilmos

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