[plug] Weird FD0 problem...

[Trevor Phillips]

Ok, I've just tonight discovered that the floppy drive in my Linux Lab I run at
Curtin doesn't work at all. ie; Students wanting to use Good Ol' Floppies (yes,
they do exist), want to transfer their assignment, etc, to/from Linux, and it
doesn't work!

I've investigated, and any FD type activity, like mounting the drive (incl.
auto-mounting), dd if'ing from it, etc, just results in the FD light on, and no
response from the program. Only way to stop it is to eject the floppy, at which
time whichever app dies with an error such as:
   mount: /dev/fd0 is not a valid block device

There is nothing strange showing up in syslog, messages, etc...

I have checked /dev/fd0 and AFAICS it's set up correctly. I even nuked it and
recreated it using MAKEDEV. Still no joy.

I was using a hand-compiled 2.2.18 kernel, so I used a Debian packaged 2.2.19.
Still no joy.

About the only sus thing is when booting, I get the following error (listed
here with the surrounding normal messages):

****
Floppy drive(s): fd0 is 1.44M
Uhhuh. NMI received. Dazed and confused, but trying to continue
You probably have a hardware problem with your RAM chips
FDC 0 is a post-1991 82077
scsi : 0 hosts.
****

Now, this happens on ALL machines in the lab. Ok, so I didn't test ALL of them
literally, but all the ones I did test had this same error, and no working FDD.
They seem pretty standard PCs, with the only anomaly being they all have IDE
Zip drives. (No, I don't have a Zip disk on me to test, but a student reported
they don't work either!? Could be a config problem tho, seeing I didn't test it
properly. ^_^;;)

Anyone have any idea what the smeg is going on here??

-- 
. Trevor Phillips             -           http://jurai.murdoch.edu.au/ . 
: CWIS Systems Administrator     -           T.Phillips at murdoch.edu.au : 
| IT Services                       -               Murdoch University | 
 >------------------- Member of the #SAS# & #CFC# --------------------<
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