[15252] in Athena Bugs
Re: sparc 8.1.7: floppy handling oddness
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John Hawkinson)
Sat Jul 12 13:57:09 1997
Date: Sat, 12 Jul 1997 13:56:58 -0400 (EDT)
To: Mike Barker <mbarker@MIT.EDU>
Cc: testers@MIT.EDU, bugs@MIT.EDU
From: John Hawkinson <jhawk@MIT.EDU>
| I did some quick checking here with classic, sparc4, and sparc5
| running a mix of 8.0 or 8.1.7 which indicates that "eject floppy"
| works, and the table shown by "eject -n" does not include this
| option. (sorry, I don't think I managed to get the full set, but I got
| enough to be reasonably sure)
Thanks for doing that.
| I suspect that the original problem was either peculiar to that disk
| (I've had trouble with disks getting the sliding panel stuck in the
| drive--which "ejects" but the disk doesn't come out) or with the
| drive.
I don't think so. Maybe I wasn't clear in my message (sorry, I wanted
to send it before I forgot but was running late), but the sequence of
events was:
1. User arrives at workstation and logs in
2. User wants to use floppy drive, observes an existing
floppy in the driver.
3. User types "eject" and the floppy comes out.
4. User inserts user's own floppy and it works just fine.
5. User finishes session and attempts to eject his own floppy
with "eject". It doesn't work (I'm not sure if it gave a
diagnostic or not, sorry).
6. User asks jhawk who says "oh, use ``eject floppy''". It doesn't
work.
7. jhawk messes around for a while and tries "STOP-A / eject / go"
which works. This disturbs jhawk who was expecting it to fail
and thus it would be mechanical.
8. jhawk re-inserts the original disk the user had left next to
the workstation (removed in #3), observes "eject" and
"eject floppy" both fail but "eject fd" works. jhawk tries
this two or three times all with the same results.
9. jhawk goes back to the SIPB office to play w/ this on an 8.1
machine.
10. jhawk gets horribly confused and sends mail.
So, something was clearly wrong with software on the 8.0 machine the
user was using. I'll be in W20 later today, I think I remember which
machine it was (by location) so I'll try and locate and replicate
it. According to ~nocturne/maps/w20-575 it was probably w20-575-50.
--jhawk
