# Floppy drive on Sun Ultra 10.



## nongrato (Oct 14, 2013)

Hi, everyone!

I have a Sun Ultra 10 workstation which came with Solaris 7 preinstalled, but there is not much I can do with Solaris 7 because finding any usable software for this system is a real pain. So I decided to give FreeBSD a try since Ultra 10 was in the list of supported platforms. The problem is that I cannot access the floppy drive. There's no special file for FDD like /dev/fd0 or something. 

It appeared that floppy drive support was disabled in GENERIC kernel config. I tried to rebuild the kernel with device fdcline uncommented, but an error occurred saying that "device fdc is unknown". Then I uncommented device atapifd; successfully rebuilt and reinstalled the kernel, but still no special file for FDD.

Is there anything I can do to make the floppy drive work?

Thanks!


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## SirDice (Oct 14, 2013)

Can't you make it boot from the install CD/DVD? Even for i386/amd64 they stopped supplying the boot floppy quite some time ago.


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## kpa (Oct 14, 2013)

Ask this on the freebsd-sparc64 mailing list. I'm afraid however that this is a lost cause because floppy drives are now seen as relics from the prehistory, hence the removal of the driver.


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## nongrato (Oct 14, 2013)

Ultra 10 itself is a prehistoric relic, but if it's in a list of supported platforms.. well.. perhaps I shold try an older version of FreeBSD? Currently It's running 8.1.  



			
				kpa said:
			
		

> Ask this on the freebsd-sparc64 mailing list. I'm afraid however that this is a lost cause because floppy drives are now seen as relics from the prehistory now, hence the removal of the driver.


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## Oko (Oct 15, 2013)

Risking to irritate fellow FreeBSD users I would suggest that you look OpenBSD. OpenBSD support for sparc64 was second only to Solaris and currently is probably better than Solaris. There is more than 6000 pre compiled packages for Sparc64 (OpenBSD packages are far less granular than FreeBSD ports so that is probably equivalent to 20 000 ports).


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## zspider (Oct 15, 2013)

nongrato said:
			
		

> Ultra 10 itself is a prehistoric relic, but if it's in a list of supported platforms.. well.. perhaps I shold try an older version of FreeBSD? Currently It's running 8.1.



I got FreeBSD 8.x running on an Ultra 5, it didn't like 9.x and the install would bork, though it might work if I did the install by hand. It seemed to work better with OpenBSD as suggested by @Oko.


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## nongrato (Oct 15, 2013)

Well, following your suggestion I've installed OpenBSD on my poor Ultra 10. The great thing is that it supports the original Sun keyboard layout. The bad thing is that, except for a brief installation guide, there is no documentation AT ALL. My FDD still doesn't work. Trying to `mount -t msdos /dev/fd0c /mnt/floppy` throws me an error 
	
	



```
device not configured
```
 Unfortunately, having no documentation and no extrasensory abilities I cannot guess how to make it work. And they still want me to buy their CDs and T-shirts?


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## nongrato (Oct 15, 2013)

I have to apologize to OpenBSD community, because at first I was confused  and acually OpenBSD FAQ is much more usable than it seemed at first glance. But still no solution for my problem.


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## SirDice (Oct 15, 2013)

We can't really help you with OpenBSD issues. You should visit the OpenBSD forums for that.


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## Oko (Oct 15, 2013)

nongrato said:
			
		

> Well, following your suggestion I've installed OpenBSD on my poor Ultra 10. The great thing is that it supports the original Sun keyboard layout. The bad thing is that, except for a brief installation guide, there is no documentation AT ALL. My FDD still doesn't work. Trying to `mount -t msdos /dev/fd0c /mnt/floppy` throws me an error
> 
> 
> 
> ...



You have to be kidding me. OpenBSD has by far the best documentation of any operating system in existance. However, unlike other OSs people are actually expected to read man pages. Now speaking of Ultra 10 have you check http://www.openbsd.org/sparc64.html#hardware. Ultra 10 has sparc processor but in many respect is a cheap PC and is probably with Blade 150 the worst peace of hardware Sun ever made. Many of components on Ultra 10 a just peaces Sun stole from PCs. Unfortunately I can not be of more help as I have access at the moment only to Blade 2500 which is fine, fine machine.


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