Subject: Installing with 2 floppy drives

From: Hans Bogaards <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 28 Apr 1998 16:24:09 +0200

Hello,

I'm stilll trying to get Linux installed on my A5000 (Yes, I'm stubborn)

I now have two floppy drives and they work o.k. under Risc OS. My idea was
to make linux mount a floppy-disk in one drive as 'root' and a floppy in the
other drive as 'supplemental' (with the correct images of course)

But when I try this by giving the kernel the followoing options:

   root=/dev/fd1 ramdisk_size=0
   
The kernel fails to mount the root-disk and gives the following error
(approx, because I don't have my arch at hand)

end_request: I/O error. failure to read device 02:01

My question is now, why can't linux find the second floppy drive and is it
possible to do it this way (maybe with a changed kernel or root-disk or with
other kernel options)
-- 
Tot mails!                        "You can't help respecting someone
Hans                                    who can spell Tuesday,
                                     even if he spells it wrong"
                                                      Winnie the Pooh
unsubscribe: body of `unsubscribe linux-arm' to [email-masked]

---

From: Russell King - ARM Linux Admin <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 28 Apr 1998 20:10:39 +0100 (BST)

> possible to do it this way (maybe with a changed kernel or root-disk or with

RiscOS is a bit sneeky when it boots up - if you have 1 drive configured, it
checks each physical drive position starting at zero to find the drive.  If
you have two, then they can be in positions 1 and 3 for example.

However, Linux *expects* then to be configured so that drive 0 is position 0,
drive 1 is position 1 etc, where:

	position 0 = slot 0 drive 0
	position 1 = slot 0 drive 1
	position 2 = slot 1 drive 0
	position 3 = slot 1 drive 1

Unfortunately, the Linux floppy driver as it stands (it's getting to be rather
unmaintainable and is due for a re-write soon) is not able to perform the
detection of the drive position, and as such, they must be configured correctly.
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