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From: klier@cs.tu-berlin.de (Jan Klier)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.bugs
Subject: fd0 driver reboots machine
Date: 19 May 1994 07:22:27 GMT
Organization: Technical University of Berlin, Germany
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Summary: fd0 driver accessing unformatted floppy kills the machine
I had this problem this morning when I tried to write a tar archive to
fd0. By mistake I inserted a fresh and unformatted floppy into the drive.
The result was that the fd0 driver bombed me with fatal error messages.
So far not much of a problem. But I was unable to stop the driver from
trying to write. Killing the tar process didn't help, because the
write call wasn't interruptable.
But much more serious was, that the machine simply booted after 2 minutes
of unsuccessful retries.
Now, having write errors on a hard disk is unlikely, so this kind of reaction
might be ok, but inserting an unformatted floppy is not that uncommon. So
maybe there should be a solution that the fd0 device aborts the call
after a defined number of retries and reports an error.
jan
--
*********** Freedom is inversely proportional to security ******************
Jan Klier Berlin, Germany
e-mail: klier@cs.tu-berlin.de CIS: 100022,1700
Jan.Klier@ipk.fhg.de 100022.1700@compuserve.com