From: Nan Zou (nan@matt.ksu.ksu.edu)
Date: 02/14/93


From: nan@matt.ksu.ksu.edu (Nan Zou)
Subject: Re: Diskette revival
Date: 14 Feb 1993 22:17:35 -0600

jon@robots.ox.ac.uk writes:

>I use a Sun workstation to make up multivolume tar files to take home.
>Although this mostly works ok, the suns have a habbit of making disekettes
>unreadable after a few uses. At this point the Suns will refuse to read/write
>the disks and linux will give some floppy error.

>The only solution I have for this is to boot DOS and run revive diskette from
>within the norton 6.0 disk tools. Generally the diskette is then ok, and the
>data on it can be read without error.

>1) Does anyone know how/what the norton revive diskette does.

Sorry, I don't really know.

[...]

>3) Why does Sun ship such shi^H^H^H terrible floppy drives/floppy drivers?

You tell me, I usually copy the entire SLS distribution onto floppies
from a Sun, in my experience, 1 out of 7 floppies will have errors on
them. I've been burnt a few times, the SLS installation program simply
bombs out in the middle of an install, and I have to get the entire disk
and start the installation again (grrrrr). Now I first check the
integrity of the files before I start the installation. Errors usually
occur when copying hugh files, small files rarely have errors.

-- Nan