Re: Floppies read by Windows but not by Linux

On Wed, 12 Jan 2011 09:28:03 +0100, David Brown wrote:

On 11/01/2011 23:08, Robert Heller wrote:
At Tue, 11 Jan 2011 22:08:17 +0100 Rikishi42<skunkworks@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:


On 2011-01-11, Charles Packer<mailbox@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Why can some of my older floppies, newly written on with my vintage
Sony Mavica camera, be read by Windows XP but not by Linux? All I
know at this point is that formatting is not at issue.

Maybe they're formatted in FAT16, rather than FAT32 ?

True floppies (eg 1.44Mbyte) are normally formatted FAT12. FAT16 was
for larger media, like Zip disks (100, 150, 250 mbytes).


I seem to recall reading a case in which that FAT16 was supported, but
wasn't one of the format that the automated mounting would use.

Linux does not work like that: there is fat, vfat, and msdos at the FS
level. Where it is 12 bit, 16 bit or 32 bit pointers happens at a
lower level (when what passes a super-block is read at mount time).


Try to mount it manually, using FAT16 as type.

Under mount options for fat, vfat, and msdos:

fat=12 / fat=16 / fat=32
Specify a 12, 16 or 32 bit fat. This overrides the
automatic FAT type detection routine. Use with caution!

Also, check the type in Windows, asking for the properties of the
floppy.


If it is (for some odd reason) NTFS, that would be different and yes,
most linux kernels don't include full support (if at all) for NTFS.


Most modern distros support NTFS out of the box (perhaps read-only by
default automatic identification, requiring an explicit fs type for
read-write). However, NTFS won't fit on a floppy - the basic fs
structures are too big.

I had a similar problem, where I couldn't really write reliable to floppy
disks under any linux distro. For some odd reason, the problem just
disappeared and now my floppy drive works find. This is a new, AMD 64bit
machine running Fedora 11. I suspect the kernel. Can you be more
specific about the failure? What 'dmesg' messages do you get, if any,
about the failure.

Drivers shouldn't be an issue. The fat or MSDOS mount option should work.
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Floppies read by Windows but not by Linux
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