Most recent kernel where this bug did not occur: unknown Distribution: Debian testing Hardware Environment: IBM Thinkpad R52 (see http://thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:R52) with external floppy (see http://thinkwiki.org/wiki/UltraBay_II_Floppy_Drive) Software Environment: Problem Description / Steps to reproduce: I have an IBM Thinkpad R52 with linux 2.6.16 running. The laptop does not have an internal floppy, but the port replicator (IBM ThinkPad Port Replicator II) has an external (proprietary) floppy port. My old IBM Thinkpad 770 has a floppy drive that can be connected to that port. In Microsoft Windows XP, the drive works out of the box. When using the linux floppy driver, it seems to be unable to seek on a floppy disk. It starts accessing the floppy, and I can hear the disk spinning, but I can't hear the typical "seeking sounds". That happens when trying to mount the same floppy MS Windows could read, but also when mounting a floppy with a minix fs. I have attached a portion of my syslog, showing the debug info while trying to access the drive. I've inserted lines that mark the command I executed that lead to the debug messages (It's still complete, though--nothing cut out.) I can't kill the mount process, so the only way of stopping the debug messages is to induce an error by ejecting the floppy. It would be great if you could check out what goes wrong inside the floppy driver. Feel free to contact me for additional information. Thanks in advance!
Created attachment 7897 [details] Syslog portion
As it has been a while since I reported this bug, I'm just wondering if anybody got the report. I'm not sure if the selected category is correct, but I couldn't find anything that suits better for floppy drives.
There're people reading it, but it may be hard to find someone who can/want to fix it. Sadly, there're few people willing to work in "outdated" technology (many people doesn't even have floppies to test anymore) and even more if the problems comes from using "weird" hardware (no easy to get a laptop + that external drive to test it) ;( There's also another problem, and is that historically, the driver floppy has never had a real maintainer, many people touches it but nobody compromises seriously to maintain it. Anyway, in case someone tries to fix it, it may be useful to get a dmesg output and things like that. (PD: I noticed you compressed your syslog output attachment. Please don't, it's much easier to handle attachments when they're not compressed)
Andre, Can you confirm the problem still there with the latest kernels? Thanks.
(In reply to comment #4) I just hooked up my external floppy drive to the docking station while the system was already booted, inserted a floppy disk and mounted it without further complications, no module parameters needed either. Seems to work now. I haven't tried in a long time, but the happier I am now :-) I haven't tested booting with the floppy drive attached, but I guess that should work if even warm-plugging works. If you wish, you can close the bug. Regards, Andre
How silly of me... I am using kernel 2.6.21.1 with the suspend2 patch applied... Thanks a lot! Andre