Hi guys!
I'd like to tell you my long battle for good working floppy drive and using floppy disks daily. I am really into legacy data storage media.
It's my passion and I am on the beginnig of building my three first computers with typical 3,5" 1,44MB floppies working perfectly.
For now I got two machines:
1. ASRock 960GM-GS3-FX with AMD FX 8320
2. Asus P5KC with Intel Core2 Duo E4600
Both has 34-pin floppy connector.
When I came up with that idea I started to look for a good OS that feels the way I used to like, and additionally
is very, very customizable - the bahaviour and the GUI.
I choose MX Linux KDE Plasma.
Then I thought I'm home, but unfortunately it came up that there is a horrible problem with floppies reading/writing. Long time I was pretty sure it's because MX Linux drivers or something.
This caused I grabbed a FreeDOS Live CD and the problem disappeared on THE SAME harware.
Then I discovered EasyOS - run it and the floppy problem came back.
After that I understood that it's not MX Linux because EasyOS Linux does the same.
In short:
- take a new MS DOS formatted floppy disk
- [MX Linux or EasyOS] create and write some txt files on it, unmount
- [MX Linux] reading it is impossible. Access not allowed, no rights etc.
- [EasyOS] unable to mount disk, input-output error etc.
- [FreeDOS] all data correctly readable and writeable
- take a new MS DOS formatted floppy disk
- [FreeDOS] create and write some txt files on it
- [MX Linux] can read it correctly. Add few letters to a file content and save. unmount
- [FreeDOS] displays corrupted data
- take a new MS DOS formatted floppy disk
- [FreeDOS] create and write some txt files on it
- [EasyOS] can read it correctly. Create and save anothet txt file. unmount
- [FreeDOS] displays corrupted data
- take the corrupted data floppy disk
- [EasyOS] can't mount it. can't format it (low level)
- [MX Linux) Can't mount it. Has no low level floppy format option (sic!)
- [FreeDOS] displays corrupted content or see an empty disk. Does low level formatting with no errors.
- [EasyOS] mounts and sees an empty disk. Can write files.
All tests done on two machines (se above) and three various floppy drives.
Are you guys hooked yet?
To be honest I'm a bit exhausted yet. Have no power for now to do test with another distro, but it looks like the Linux problem.
FreeDOS has no problem with THE VERY SAME hardware.
What do you think?
