Floppy problem (& multiple boots)

[Floyd Davidson]

zaft at suned1.nswses.navy.mil (Gordon C Zaft) writes:
[...]
>7300 was working nicely, but I decided to replace the floppy drive since
>(as I'd been warned) the floppy drive was screwy (it would read floppies
>but not write/format).
>
>	I went out and bought a nice, brand-new Teac 55BR; changed the

I can't help on the new drive because I don't know what a 55BR is
compared to a 55B, but...

You might tried cleaning the old one up and putting it back in.
Be careful to clean the little led and detector that shines through
the write protect notch on the left side of the floppy disk.  Chances
are very good that the only problem with the drive is that it thinks
everything is write-protected because of dust on one side or the other
of that led/detector combination.  It has happened to several of us!

>
[...]
>	As if that wasn't bad enough, at the same time (I THINK) as I
>changed the floppy drive, the machine starting to do the double-boot
>thing on powerup; it would boot, get to "checking stored files", then
>reboot and be fine.  If I rebooted once the machine had been up,
>it was fine.  Is this a power supply problem or is it related to the
>floppy thing?
>

Maybe neither.  Once you have the machine up try running "/etc/fsck -D"
and see what you get.  The initialization script, /etc/rc, has a
good/bad idea in it about checking the file system.  Most UNIX systems
don't come up automatically, but the UnixPC was supposed to be user
friendly, so it does.  And it also hides from you everything that
the file system check finds.  There is a place in the /etc/rc script
where it does something like "fsck -pq /dev/fp002 || { more script }",
where the { more script } is a reboot (Mine is long since changed, so
I'm not sure exactly how it is done...)  The 'q' option tells fsck
to be quiet and not tell you what it is doing; the 'p' option tells
fsck to "fix minor problems"  ( see fsck(1m) ).  Running fsck on
/dev/fp002 will cause a reboot if anything is "fixed".

That is where your reboot is coming from, most likely.  It seems
that something is getting fixed everytime, but you can't see what
it is because of the way the script is arranged.

Floyd
-- 
Floyd L. Davidson  |  floyd at ims.alaska.edu   |  Alascom, Inc. pays me
Salcha, AK 99714   |    Univ. of Alaska      |  but not for opinions.