Solved Only single floppy drive detecting...

drbytes

drbytes

I have an ASUS P4VBX-MX system (VIA chipset), with a 1.2MB 5.25" FDD and a 1.44MB 3.5" FDD that I was hoping to set up to image some old media.

I was able to set both drives in the CMOS settings, and then proceeded to install DOS 6.22 from floppies, and was able to see (and access) both drives.

I installed FreeBSD 10.1, and did a binary update (freebsd-update) to 10.1-RELEASE-p10.

However, doing a
dmesg | grep fd
only brings up the controller (fdc0) and 1 drive (fd0). I was under the impression that it would auto-detect both floppies. Is there something else I have to do in order to get both recognized?

Thanks in advance, and I'm willing to RTFM if someone points me to the correct M, as my GoogleFu and manfu have failsauced me at this endeavour.
 
Aye, I'm confused.

Did check the link and man pages for fdc(4) and fdcontrol(8), however, AFAIK the default hints file should allow for probing of both FDDs (does contain fd0 and fd1 options).
 
I've fixed a lot of bugs in floppy driver (fdc.c) and floppy utils in FreeBSD 8.3 and 8.4 versions. If you are interested, please to look my bug report with patches (for FreeBSD 8.3) PR 174711
My main machine(ASUS CUR-DLS) also have two floppy drive: 3.5" and 5.25"(HD). It works with FreeBSD 8.4. Unfortunately I did not check floppy driver in the 10.x version,
but it definitely needs to do. Let me know if you need modified floppy driver for FreeBSD 8.4 and I'll send it for you!

On 10.x issue, I hope within next 1-2 months I'll check floppy driver in 10.x version and let you know about.
 
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I was checking dual floppy configuration in 10.1 (~september 2014) yesterday. I found no problems with access to fd1 without any special settings/hints.

Of course I set appropriate floppy type in BIOS setup. I successfully read 1.2Mb and 360Kb diskettes(with 5.25" HD drive) and 1.44Mb diskettes(with 3.5" drive).

Implied seek has been disabled in original 10.x driver, since implied seek break 2step operations(as I wrote in my bug report). Hence 360Kb(DD) diskette read normally in the my 5.25" HD floppy drive.

Try to check your system again(try out another release and another board). It might be help to determine the cause of problem.
 
Because it is very unusual these days is hard to find similar problems. But I'm also having problems with my diskette driver.
 
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I often fiddle with old floppy drives/diskettes even 160/180/320/360Kb.
FreeBSD - excellent OS, its modern versions work nice with my old and even very old HW(most part - P6 class).
Just sometimes for proper functioning old HW needs to change kernel sources.
 
Thanks wblock@ and i386! You led me down the right path, and I appreciate the extra lookup and confirmation that 10.1 should detect both drives. As this is an older motherboard, a BIOS update was out of the question, however, I started tweaking around.

What ended up working for me to get both drives detected, was to disable the ACPI driver. I added
Code: 
hint.acpi.0.disabled="1"
to /boot/device.hints and now both floppy drives detect and work like a charm!
 
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