Very bad issue with USB floppy disk drive (Solved - hardware problem)

[r-tea]

I mounted the floppy disk using pmount.
I displayed its contents in the console using ls.
Then I unmounted it.
After that, I couldn't mount it again.

There must be something strange about how floppy disks/drives are handled in Linux in general, because I experienced the same issue once under MX Linux. Any change to the contents of the floppy disk (and it seems like even just mounting and reading it) ends up corrupting its contents.
Has any Puppy user ever successfully used floppy disks on a recent Linux system? I'm curious whether it's even possible without running into corruption issues.

[Geek3579]

I had a very similar experience last year with a pile of floppies. I recall having to reboot the computer or at least reload the windows manager to get past it, but check for yourself.

[bigpup]

You are assuming the floppy disk drive is working properly. Nothing wrong with the floppy disc.

The floppy disk. How old and how much has it been used?

How old is the drive?

Has it ever been cleaned inside drive bay?

Is it an internal drive mounted in the computer?

[Geek3579]

In my case its a new external USB floppy drive bought to look at content from c2008 floppies, which have very little on them in most cases, and probably hardly used.

[Wiz57]

An external USB diskette drive may have been mounted as a "Mass USB Storage Device" expecting the format to be FAT32 or maybe exFAT??
Those old diskettes and floppys were normally formatted in FAT12...don't know if this is the culprit, but something to investigate.

[bigpup]

I have a portable floppy disc drive, USB connection to computer.

I do have to make sure I plug it into a USB port that will provide full 5v power output and 500mA

It is for the small 3.5" size floppy discs, mine are 1.44MB, formatted fat 16.
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Floppy-Disk-Size-2965533762.jpg (12.07 KiB) Viewed 298 times

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I am not having any issues mounting and UN-mounting it.

In mounting, it is slow to spin the disc up and start reading from it. So mounting is slow to show mounted.

Because of the slow speed.

Writing to the drive will look like it is finished in Rox file manager, but it is still being written, as I can hear the drive still writing.
That is kind of a small bug with Rox. It will show complete when it is still finishing the writing.
The larger the size getting written the more this is an issue.

[r-tea]

You are assuming the floppy disk drive is working properly. Nothing wrong with the floppy disc.

The floppy disk. How old and how much has it been used?

How old is the drive?

Has it ever been cleaned inside drive bay?

Is it an internal drive mounted in the computer?

I've worked for 5 years in a PC repair shop, used to build Amigas, and I still use my C64 to this day. It’s been almost 30 years now, so I know these things need to be tested thoroughly, not just on the surface.

I’ve gone through this FDD issue using 4 different PCs, each with a different internal floppy drive, plus one external USB floppy, and several more loose FDDs I swapped in one by one when suspected the drive might be faulty. I've go around 30 floppy disks. About 2/3 of them are brand new, still sealed Sony and Verbatim ones. The rest are used, second-hand floppies.

I ran LiveCD FreeDOS on all the machines, and installed Windows XP on two of them. One PC runs MX Linux with KDE Plasma, and the current one has DPup64.

My takeaway: under FreeDOS and XP I had ZERO issues reading, writing, or formatting disks. I tested all my FDDs with FreeDOS (except the USB one — it’s not supported), and I did find one bad drive, which is already in the trash.

[bigpup]

You posted in the BookwormPup section, so we assume you are using BookwormPup64, but what version?

Using BookwormPup64 10.0.10 I have no issue with my USB external floppy drive.

Note:
Spin up is slow, after inserting a disc, and it totally getting mounted.
Has to be totally spun up before it will mount.

Try this:

Do the mounting and UN-mounting using the desktop drive icon for the drive.

After inserting a disc give a little time for the drive icon to show.

Need a disk in the drive to have a desktop drive icon show up on the desktop.
May also need to be a formatted disk. Would be if something is on it.

If disc is not formatted, it should still be seen as a drive to work on, in Gparted program.

[bigpup]

Did you ever find out what format the disks are?

If yes, what?

Puppy Linux does not support all possible formats.

Most common formats are supported.

[r-tea]

You posted in the BookwormPup section, so we assume you are using BookwormPup64, but what version?

Using BookwormPup64 10.0.10 I have no issue with my USB external floppy drive.

I also use BookwormPup64 10.0.10. Previously, I have used MX Linux and EasyOS (for Linux), and FreeDOS and Windows XP (for other systems).

Note:
Spin up is slow, after inserting a disc, and it totally getting mounted.
Has to be totally spun up before it will mount.

Of course, that's obvious.

Try this:

Do the mounting and UN-mounting using the desktop drive icon for the drive.

After inserting a disc give a little time for the drive icon to show.

Need a disk in the drive to have a desktop drive icon show up on the desktop.

Clear. The problem is that Puppy doesn't show a floppy icon. I had it working like that in EasyOS — it had a permanent floppy icon on the desktop, no matter whether a disk was inserted or not.
But the desktop icon isn’t a big issue. A workaround isn’t a big deal either (I made a separate thread about that).
The real problem is that I have always mounted and unmounted floppy disks carefully and properly in the console.

May also need to be a formatted disk. Would be if something is on it.

If disc is not formatted, it should still be seen as a drive to work on, in Gparted program.

I have a bunch of factory-MS-DOS-preformatted floppies. Most of them are factory-sealed. Some of them I formatted myself — on Windows XP and FreeDOS.

[r-tea]

Did you ever find out what format the disks are?

If yes, what?

Puppy Linux does not support all possible formats.

Most common formats are supported.

Sure. All of them are FAT12 formatted, and most of them are factory preformatted. Then, some of them I formatted to FAT12 myself, mostly after a Linux failure to make them usable again.

[bigpup]

Wonder what a floppy disk formatted fat16 would do.

[Flash]

....Writing to the drive will look like it is finished in Rox file manager, but it is still being written, as I can hear the drive still writing.
That is kind of a small bug with Rox. It will show complete when it is still finishing the writing.
The larger the size getting written the more this is an issue.

This is an issue with USB thumb drives as well. I've noticed that the drive can't be unmounted until the OS is finished with it. Clicking on the little x that shows on the icon when it's mounted will cause the ROX window to close, but the x won't go away until writing is done. Also, rsync might be worth investigating for copying to the floppy.

[r-tea]

Guys, here are some fresh updates from my personal battlefield with floppies, Linux, and my hardware.

Looks like I might have to say sorry to Linux (and honestly, I hope I will!) for blaming it for messing up my floppies - because after this latest round of testing, a picture is starting to emerge. Some final conclusions:

1) Once I took one motherboard out of the testing chain - or more precisely, just its 34-pin floppy connector - the weird file system corruption stopped completely. This part of the test was all about Linux.

2) That same connector seems totally fine when I use only FreeDOS or Windows XP.

3) I even managed to get my external USB floppy working under FreeDOS - and it's playing nice with every OS. Reads and writes without a fuss.

4) Turns out the internal floppy drive I threw out the other day (yep, the one I mentioned earlier) was actually fine. It just happened to be stuck the longest to that bad floppy port, so it was wrongly blamed.

So... good news, right?

[bigpup]

The first rule of designing, making anything.

If it never fails.

They will only buy it one time!

Rule 2.
How long should it be before it fails and not make people to never want to buy it again?

So is a Puppy version now able to read and write to the floppies?

[r-tea]

So is a Puppy version now able to read and write to the floppies?

Like I said in point 1), both Puppy and MX Linux stopped messing up the file structure on my floppies after I stopped using the dodgy floppy connector on one of my MOBOs.
But now a new question arises: why is that same connector totally fine with Windows XP and FreeDOS?

[bigpup]

Are you asking about doing it on the exact same computer or using the cable on a different computer?

[r-tea]

The very same computer. No changes, including BIOS setup.