Unable to format or use floppies since 2.6.28

Mark Hounschell
2009-12-10T19:46:11Z

I have many boxes. They all do the same thing. Running different versions of SuSE, 10.3-11.2. Any kernel at or above 2.6.28 fails to fdformat a floppy. These same machines, using the same floppies and drives, running kernels older than 2.6.28 work just fine. I googled and found other such reports but no solution. I know better than to just assume it's a kernel bug but it sure looks like it could be so I'm inquiring about it here.

# fdformat /dev/fd0u1440
Double-sided, 80 tracks, 18 sec/track. Total capacity 1440 kB.
Formatting ... done
Verifying ... Problem reading cylinder 1, expected 18432, read 2048

dmesg from 2.6.32:

Dec 10 14:24:21 harley kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev fd0, sector 45
Dec 10 14:24:21 harley kernel: Buffer I/O error on device fd0, logical block 5
Dec 10 14:24:23 harley kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev fd0, sector 72
Dec 10 14:24:23 harley kernel: Buffer I/O error on device fd0, logical block 9
Dec 10 14:24:26 harley kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev fd0, sector 117
Dec 10 14:24:26 harley kernel: Buffer I/O error on device fd0, logical block 14
Dec 10 14:24:28 harley kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev fd0, sector 127
Dec 10 14:24:28 harley kernel: Buffer I/O error on device fd0, logical block 15
Dec 10 14:24:30 harley kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev fd0, sector 45
Dec 10 14:24:30 harley kernel: Buffer I/O error on device fd0, logical block 5
Dec 10 14:24:32 harley kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev fd0, sector 144
Dec 10 14:24:32 harley kernel: Buffer I/O error on device fd0, logical block 18
Dec 10 14:24:34 harley kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev fd0, sector 189
Dec 10 14:24:34 harley kernel: Buffer I/O error on device fd0, logical block 23
Dec 10 14:24:36 harley kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev fd0, sector 216
Dec 10 14:24:36 harley kernel: Buffer I/O error on device fd0, logical block 27
Dec 10 14:24:39 harley kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev fd0, sector 261
Dec 10 14:24:39 harley kernel: Buffer I/O error on device fd0, logical block 32
Dec 10 14:24:41 harley kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev fd0, sector 288
Dec 10 14:24:41 harley kernel: Buffer I/O error on device fd0, logical block 36
Dec 10 14:24:43 harley kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev fd0, sector 333
Dec 10 14:24:43 harley kernel: Buffer I/O error on device fd0, logical block 41
Dec 10 14:24:45 harley kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev fd0, sector 360
Dec 10 14:24:45 harley kernel: Buffer I/O error on device fd0, logical block 45

# rpm -qf /usr/sbin/fdformat
util-linux-2.16-4.5.1.i586

Again, on this very machine, running 2.6.27.41 all is fine....

Thanks in advance
Mark