Re: fedora & RH9 system hangs making boot floppy

From: J.W. Vraets (jwvraets_at_NOSPAM.sympatico.ca)
Date: 02/29/04 

Date: Sun, 29 Feb 2004 13:53:23 -0500

William Winkler wrote:
> The silence isn't a lack of sympathy. Sure sounds like there's something
> unusual about your floppy drive, since you have three other systems running
> Fedora without any problem. When I check my floppy in XP, it says "standard
> floppy controller" and "standard floppy drive". My Linux system doesn't
> have a floppy.
>
> Nothing at all shows up on dmesg, the system log, the X log, the kernel
> startup log, the boot log?
>
> "J.W. Vraets" <jwvraets@NOSPAM.sympatico.ca> wrote in message
> news:YJ30c.22286$253.1563963@news20.bellglobal.com...
>
>>I am getting really puzzled by this and searching has not yielded any
>>enlightenment so far. Perhaps someone can either hep or point me in the
>>right direction...
>>
>>I have a Intel P4 system with Asus P4S8X-X motherboard, 512 meg RDRam, 2
>>hard drives, CDRW and DVD, and a 3.5 floppy.
>>
>>I am currently running WinXp and have partitioned the first drive as
>>follows:
>>
>>20 gig NTFS (c: for Win XP)
>>20 gig NTFS (data for Win XP)
>>15 gig fat32 for shared linux and win data storage
>>the remainder of the 80 gig Maxtor drive left over for Linux.
>>
>>The Linux partitions are requested to be as follows:
>>swap - 1000 meg
>>/boot - 128 meg
>>/ - 8000 meg
>>/home - 5000 meg
>>/data - the remainder of the indicated available 25698 meg in the
>>otherwise unused disk space.
>>
>>I tried installing Fedora and elected not to use a boot loader but just
>>a boot floppy. As soon as the install process reaches the boot floppy
>>creation stage and starts it up the system hangs completely. The only
>>way out is to force a reset/reboot. Win XP boots just fine and can
>>access the floppy for all purposes with no problems. I repeated the
>>process (formatting the partitions) - same result.
>>
>>Wondering if it was Fedora issue, I installed RH9 (formatting the
>>partitions as well) and it did create a boot disk and RH9 does boot
>>successfully but when I try to mount the floppy from the desktop (GNOME
>>rt click, etc) the system hangs. I can restart the system and open a
>>terminal window and try to mkbootdisk the system also hangs.
>>
>>Regardless, booting to XP works just fine.
>>
>>Now I have 3 other systems running Fedora (one by itself, one dual boot
>>with ME and one dual boot with Win 98SE) and all work just fine.
>>
>>Anyone have any idea what I am running into? Help or sympathy
>>appreciated ;-)
>>
>>J.W. Vraets
>>
>>I
>>
>>Wondering if
>
>
>
William:

Thanks for the response. I checked the logs but they are pretty boring.
The only floppy references relate to the capacity (i.e. "Floppy
drive(s): fd0 is 1.44M") and the associated driver (i.e. "ide-floppy
driver 0.99newide"). The only possible concern is unrelated to floppies:
"DIT: Sun Feb 29 13:22:17 2004: 5102X: client 5 rejected from local
host" in the XFree86 log file.

The hang in the floppy access is repeatable (reset boot or full power
off reboot - same result).

I have obtained a copy of Mandrake and perhaps I will try it later and
see if it behaves any better.

I am getting deeply suspicious of a possible hardware compatibility
issue now.

J.W.