It's 2021 And The Linux Kernel's Floppy Driver Is Still Seeing The Occasional Patch

[ssokolow]

I remember having to obtain a copy of one of the floppies for install because of corruption. I think the official disks were hard fixed against writing, so checking them for repair wasn't an option.

Yeah. As a kid, it didn't occur to me that a piece of electrical tape should do the trick.

You have an interesting definition of fun. I went from what three floppies for Windows for Workgroups (Windows 3.11) to 30 something for Windows 95?

Eight. Windows for Workgroups 3.11 came on eight disks.

(Windows 3.1 came on seven, though the last disk was optional printer drivers.)

[ssokolow]

Real fun is booting Linux and create funny filenames like a: b: and c: on the windows filesystem and see weird stuff happening in windows.
Unless they have fixed it now.

Likewise for taking advantage of how NTFS supports case-sensitive filenames or how some MacOS configurations get very confused if you force filenames with the wrong Unicode normal form.

[ssokolow]

You can simply create a virtual floppy drive instead of buying old hardware that wont fit in most older PC's anyway without uet more floppy controller addins.

I could also have just reassigned A: or B: to another letter. I'm purely talking about a sense of entertainment I'd have gotten from plugging in three actual floppy drives and seeing Windows's automatic behaviour have no choice but to assign a floppy a non-A, non-B drive letter.

[stiiixy]

You can simply create a virtual floppy drive instead of buying old hardware that wont fit in most older PC's anyway without uet more floppy controller addins.

[Etherman]

Yep. A: and B: as expected.

https://imgur.com/a/xRb504Y

Makes me wish I had a third one just for the fun of forcing Windows to assign a non-A/B drive letter to a floppy.

Real fun is booting Linux and create funny filenames like a: b: and c: on the windows filesystem and see weird stuff happening in windows.
Unless they have fixed it now.

[f0rmat]

There was only a small amount of sarcasm in my post. Just a tiny bit. Nothing like waiting around a PC watching a blue bar go slowwwwly only for the 'please insert disk number xx' to pop up. meant you couldn't really get anything RL done!

And a 3.5GB drive back then would have been HUGE. And they started to sound really loud as well, the bearings in them I believe.

Just a small amount? And those hard drives were loud - when they were spinning up, they sounded like a stick shift synchronizer when you missed a shift in a car with a manual transmission (if you can't find 'em, grind 'em).

[stiiixy]

There was only a small amount of sarcasm in my post. Just a tiny bit. Nothing like waiting around a PC watching a blue bar go slowwwwly only for the 'please insert disk number xx' to pop up. meant you couldn't really get anything RL done!

And a 3.5GB drive back then would have been HUGE. And they started to sound really loud as well, the bearings in them I believe.

[f0rmat]

Installing Windows 95 from thirty+ floppies was fun.

You have an interesting definition of fun. I went from what three floppies for Windows for Workgroups (Windows 3.11) to 30 something for Windows 95? And we were on something like a 286 (IIRC) with EDO ram. We also had a whopping 3.5 Gigabyte hard drive that had to be partitioned into two partitions because Windows 95 could not read a partition larger than two gigabytes. We also had two floppy drives so we could copy disk to disk. Later we replaced one of the floppy drives with a (IIRC) an Iomega zip drive.

My first linux install (Mandrake) had over a dozen floppies (I cannot remember how many). I do wish that I still had those.

[stiiixy]

I remember having to obtain a copy of one of the floppies for install because of corruption. I think the official disks were hard fixed against writing, so checking them for repair wasn't an option.

The copied version I also had (cant remember how it was fit on to the floppy as I believe the originals were oversized by a few bytes) to utilise did however get corrupt and that was nightmare trying to test them all, and repair. I think you had to basically format it and reimage.

[stormcrow]

Installing Windows 95 from thirty+ floppies was fun.

Or Word on 35 or so 3.5"s and say the 33rd or 34rth got a bad spot that couldn't be recovered. Could occasionally happen even on commercially pressed floppies. FreeBSD on 30+ floppies from your local store or repurposed AOL disks could be an absolute nightmare!