# 360k Floppy Drive Annoyance



## jmetal88 (Oct 25, 2015)

Maybe somebody can help me out here, but I can't seem to find anything about this issue with a search.

I just installed FreeBSD on a system of mine that has three floppy drives installed.  I actually didn't have much trouble setting them up on the most recent version, which is great, because with Linux unless I wanted to do some hardcore customization, anything newer than a 2.6 kernel caused me some issues.  But I'm having a problem with the 360k drive.

The problem comes during the boot process, immediately after the line about Timecounter is displayed.  At this point, it probes all three of my floppy drives.  First and second drive are 1.44MB and 1.2MB respectively, it probes them, sees they're "not ready" and moves on.  Third drive is the 360k drive, and it doesn't have a "ready" line, so it sits there for a good 30 seconds or so trying to see if there's a disk in the drive before it times out and gives up.  My question is, is there any way to modify some configuration file or boot script to get it to stop probing that drive?  I've tried everything it looks like you can do with the devices.hints file, but that only seems to affect what happens when the fdc is actually initialized, and whatever this probing thing is happens a couple of steps later in the boot process.  I'd appreciate some help because, although the issue doesn't look like it's going to prevent me from using the drive, adding the extra ~30 seconds on to the boot time for an already slow machine is pretty annoying.

EDIT: Ah, nevermind, I guess there *is* an issue with reading the disks.  I'm trying to mount one right now and it sounds like it's having a lot of problems.

EDIT 2:  I think I'm just going to go back to Debian 6.0 and see if I can't tailor the system to suit my needs a little better.


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## Terry_Kennedy (Oct 31, 2015)

jmetal88 said:


> I'd appreciate some help because, although the issue doesn't look like it's going to prevent me from using the drive, adding the extra ~30 seconds on to the boot time for an already slow machine is pretty annoying.


It looks like you already have another solution for this. The first thing that comes to mind would be to build a kernel without the fdc(4) device configured. That will prevent any probing of floppy drives at boot time (and also prevent booting that FreeBSD kernel from floppy, not that anyone cares any more). You could then `# kldload fdc` sometime later on, possibly as a background task. There is probably a better way to accomplish this, but since floppy drives are so uncommon these days (and usage of them even less common), I don't know what it is.


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## i386 (Nov 3, 2015)

Yes I know. Floppy driver has a lot of bugs. I fixed some bugs in 2013 year(360k floppy related). See my bugreport with my patches here:
PR 174711.
It done for 8.x versions, but after some correction, possible make new patch for 10.x. Let me know, if you have questions about this patch! My machine(ASUS CUR-DLS) has two floppy drives: 1.2 and 360k.
BTW, how you installed 3 floppy drives to your computer? Regular boards have supported only two floppy drives.


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