floppy disk formatting: how to?

Sam Varshavchik mrsam at courier-mta.com
Thu Sep 24 00:48:19 UTC 2009


Mikkel writes:

> Sam Varshavchik wrote:
>> 
>> I don't know whether at some point in the last couple of years the
>> commonly accepted naming convention for floppy device nodes has changed,
>> or if this is a Fedora-ism. If the standard naming convention has
>> changed, then I'll update floppy as soon as I see where the new naming
>> convention is documented. But, as of now, this is what the fd man page
>> says the naming convention should be, and that's what MAKEDEV creates.
>> 
> All I can tell you is that in the /Documentation/devices.txt file in
> the kernel source/documentation, it does not list any floppy devices
> using a capital H. There is a lower case h, but that is used in
> 5-1/4" floppies.
> ...
> 40 = /dev/fd?h1440     5.25" 1440K in a 1200K drive(1)
> ...
> 28 = /dev/fd?u1440     3.5"  1440K High Density(1)
> ...
> (1) Autodetectable format

I see. But when I look into the actual kernel source:

static struct floppy_struct floppy_type[32] = {
...
        { 2880,18,2,80,0,0x1B,0x00,0xCF,0x6C,"H1440" }, /*  7 1.44MB 3.5"   

So the actual kernel source matches the man page. The label string here is 
what the kernel prints when it boots up. That's where, apparently, the 
device node names came from originally. But, looks like, at some point, for 
some reason, a different naming convention was adopted and listed in 
/Documentation, without updating the actual kernel source. And, Fedora's 
udev setup follows the /Documentation convention, while MAKEDEV follows the 
actual kernel source.

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