[Coco] [OT] 5 1/4" floppies and Linux

[Ken Carlin]

I'm having a heck of a time getting a 360K 5 1/4" floppy working correctly
under Linux, and I'm wondering if there's anyone on the list who could
help me.

I have a 3 1/2" 1.44meg floppy as drive A and a 5 1/4" 360K floppy as
drive B.  They are configured that way in my BIOS.  The drive jumper of
the 5 1/4" is set to be the second drive (DS1 in this case), and it is
hooked up on the first connector on the drive cable (before the "twist")
and the 3 1/2" drive is at the end of the cable.

It all works fine under Windows 98.  The DSKINI and RETRIEVE utilities
work correctly, and I can create a bootable NitrOS9 5 1/4" disk from a
.dsk image on nitros9.org.

However...

Under Linux (Suse 9.2), only the 3 1/2" works as expected.  I can create a
readable 720K disk with it from a .dsk image.  The 5 1/4" is a different
story.  No matter what I seem to try, it won't format (fdformat /dev/fd1)
and errors out telling me either illegal address or drive not present.

I've tried 3 different floppy drives, and all have the same result.  I
even tried a 1.2meg 5 1/4, and I came heartbreakingly close to making a
readable floppy.  It formatted and appeared to copy the image correctly,
but only the root directory was readable under NitrOS9 on the Coco.

I should also mention that I've been using Linux for a grand total of 3
days now, so I'm a complete novice.

Any help that anyone can offer will be appreciated.

--Ken Carlin