disk full up!!! why???

[voidmain]

Well, you wouldn't want to copy to /dev/fd0 as that is the raw device. You would first want to mount the floppy ("mount /mnt/floppy" for instance), then copy files to the floppy:

$ cp somefile.txt /mnt/floppy

Depending on your mount options in /etc/fstab as to whether your normal user account has permissions to write to the floppy. But if it works there, it should work in XFce. Of course I do all file operations from a shell so...

[Sleeping Dog]

Just a Diagnostic Suggestion

On your dual boot system, try loading DrDOS and a DOS utility called LREAD (if you have a little compatable space.)  Using LREAD under DrDOS you can view, modify, copy, etc. UNIX and LINUX files.  Try copying the file(s) in question to the floppy.  This will give you a good indication whether your issue is hardware or formatting related.  It might help you to at least eliminate one or more of the possibilities.

Just a thought.  Hope that it helps.

Sleeping Dog

[Centurian]

Hey Calum,

To me this sounds simular to a problem I had a while back. I also removed a floppie without unmounting it (I was in a hurry and just didn't think about it) and the entire system froze up. Nothing worked at all. I had to hard boot the system. After that the system became slower and slower as time passed. It was like the system was becoming more and more loaded down as time went on. After 5 days and dozens of reboots this still continued so I decided that something serious was wrong. (Kernel damage maybe not sure) I reformatted the linux disks and reinstalled Mandrake 8.1. After that it started working perfectly again. To say the least I have never again forgotten to unmount a drive.    I use usermount now all the time.

[Centurian]

Been sitting here thinking about this since I posted and maybe I can explain why the problem exists.

In dos everytime you access the floppie it mounts it, does what you ask of it, then unmounts the floppie. For CD's when the CD is put in the drive it mounts and when it come out it unmounts.

Linux expects you to tell it when you mount/unmount a floppie or CD. It makes no checks but simply assumes you know what you are doing. That could potentially cause alot of problems. Consider this now you remove a floppie without unmounting it then the computer continues to think it is mounted. I don't know if linux unmounts floppies at shutdown or not but somehow I doubt it does. That would have the potential to cause an endless loop within linux which would consistently slow down the computer and would cause freezes and other crashes as it slowly eats up memory. The thing there is that although after reboot the system sees the floppie as unmounted but I am guessing it also sees another non-existant floppie that is still mounted and continually attempts to access that floppie.

If that is correct it could cause an infinite amount of problems over time. In the almost 1 year that I have been using linux that is the only serious flaw I have seen in it. I know it caused me to re-install.

[mobrien_12]

You might want to start using mtools for your simple floppy disk i/o.

mdir
mdel
mcopy
mformat

etc etc man mtools

[Calum]

hmm. the crashes do not occur because i take the disk out without unmounting it. they occur when i copy, sometimes.

to check whether it is a problem in kde, i will have to use kde for a while instead of xfce (since the problem is erratic), which i will do for a week or two, to see if the problem persists.

re: rebooting after freezing causing mounting difficulties, well this may be the case, anybody have any ideas how to check/fix this?

[Calum]

okay. i have been using kde for a few weeks. Now. the freezing problem happens every now and again for NO REASON. last night it happened while i was typing in a reply to this bulletin board, and today it happened while i was trying to copy a file from one directory to another on the hard drive.

Now when this happens the screen freezes, and ctrl-alt-backspace does not restart X. xtrl-alt-f1 does not change me to a text prompt, and ctrl-alt-del does nothing. i need to hard reboot using the power button to make it work. when i do this, i get an fsck which, after going up to about 89%, tells me to run it again in non interactive mode. at this point it hangs, requiring another hard reboot. the second time the same thing happens except that after exiting at 89%, i get asked if i want to run fsck in non interactive mode, y/n to which i answer yes.

Not good, anybody know how to sort this?

[Calum]

no takers?

[Calum]

it doesn;t. i have been fighting with windows millenium for a year or two now, i am familiar with its MANY idiosyncracies. Unlike windows 2000, windows 98 and so on, that is not one of its functions.

also, your comments about linux being duff and so on are pretty redundant, and are too late. My most recent post showed that the disk thing was not the cause, and i am beginning to suspect that it is a hardware fault, possibly something to do with my video card, possibly something to do with the motherboard (since the video card is integrated, and since these SiS chips are known to be full of hardware bugs anyway i am not surprised).

A N Y W A Y . . . . .
i have since installed GNU automount and amd and have had NO problem with floppies whatsoever, it seems that Mandrake supermount is the flaky product, and what with my version of it being about a year old, i will be eager to see how the new version that comes with mandake 9.0 fares.

i think you and gooseberry clock should get together and have an irrelevancy fest, although i appreciate that you are nowhere near as irritating or as irrelevant as him, you seem to be coming close today...

[Calum]

hey, zombie, as luck and the gods would have it i just had EXACTLY THE SAME PROBLEM in windows 2000 on an IBM T22. That's some of the most normal, middle of the road hardware and software, so what's the deal? it must just be my typing style i think...

either that or windows is shit... no, couldn't be that, could it? NOW, does anybody have a sensible answer to my linux related question?

thanks in advance...

[Nobber]

I don't have a sensible answer, but I can sympathise with you! My other half uses Mandrake 8.2 on a pretty standard 3-year-old desktop machine, and she kept having problems copying stuff to floppies from within Konqueror. The machine would completely lock up just as you described. Turning off supermount for the floppy drive appears to have solved the problem, but of course that means you have to be careful to unmount a floppy disk after using it, which can be a bit irksome.

How's your experience with Mandy 9.0 been?

[Calum]

very good, but no major innovations over 8.2. I can't complain, it cost me

[DC]

quote:Originally posted by Ex Eleven / b0b:
I guess you could put sync in your /etc/crontab...

Sure... but useless. The disk is synchronized once in a while anyway - sync and unmount just forces it at *that* moment. So you don't need to automated - it does it for you! (wow, technology these days...)

Zombie: the system doesn't crash when you don't unmount, the FS gets destroyed if you're unlucky (which isn't that bad on floppies usually).
And Linux can format disks in whatever format you want - even 1.7MB (if the disk supports that - mine does for example).

Centurion, all disks are remounted at shutdown, even disks. And, due to the nature of mounts, there is no way in hell it 'saves' mounts, so it will not see a ghost-mounted floppy. Your endless loop is also bogus - if it can't sync the changes to disk it simply doesn't do that.

Worst case: you mount a floppy, change stuff, eject it (without unmount), insert another floppy, and unmount it - changes to the *first* disk is written to the second disk, trashing the first or both disks. At NO point is memory, the system in general, or other filesystems affected in ANY WAY.

[voidmain]

You are correct that the kernel will sync the disks periodically during low activity. Also the "umount" command will cause an automatic sync prior to the actual unmount.

But there is mount cache that keeps track of what file systems are currently mounted. It's /etc/mtab. If you eject a floppy or CD without unmounting it the entry will still be in /etc/mtab and the system will expect there to be a file system under that mount point. If there isn't then you most certainly will get at minimum I/O errors, a sync will certainly not be able to flush the cached writes, etc.

But you are correct that it will not cause a problem with other file systems. Maybe the leftover entry in /etc/mtab is what he was referring to as a "ghost". Usually manually removing that entry from /etc/mtab. For instance when you type "mount" to see what file systems are currently mounted, it gets it's info from /etc/mtab.

[ November 12, 2002: Message edited by: void main ]

[DC]

quote:Originally posted by void main:
If you eject a floppy or CD without unmounting it the entry will still be in /etc/mtab and the system will expect there to be a file system under that mount point. If there isn't then you most certainly will get at minimum I/O errors, a sync will certainly not be able to flush the cached writes, etc.

But you are correct that it will not cause a problem with other file systems. Maybe the leftover entry in /etc/mtab is what he was referring to as a "ghost". Usually manually removing that entry from /etc/mtab. For instance when you type "mount" to see what file systems are currently mounted, it gets it's info from /etc/mtab.

[ November 12, 2002: Message edited by: void main ]

Well yes - that happens in the worst case scenario I presented. But that effects very little, at most one other disk in the same device. And mtab isn't used during a reboot, that was the ghost he was talking about.