Linux 5.17 Lands Fix For Hanging If Ejecting A Broken Floppy

[domih]

Please support floppies. They aren't practical, but digital recovery and preservation makes it a necessity.

There's hardware floppy emulators such as Gotek ones, but sometimes you need to read something from a damn floppy.

The same about ancient and unused filesystems, there's a niche for being able to read them natively. And recovery companies are extremely expensive.

Yes, the museums of the 22nd century will thank the Linux developers who did this.

[tildearrow]

How about actually fixing the stupid two decades-old issue of having the entire Linux kernel hang when trying to unmount a drive that has been improperly removed, or a disconnected network share?

Hell, Windows never had a problem with such things since day one.

No hangs on a machine which used to have a loose USB cable to an external disk that would unplug up to 20 times per hour.

[Vorpal]

Some of you ever called those "diskettes" back then? We did it here in Brazil, but I don't remember reading or hearing English speakers calling those "diskettes", just "floppies".

In Sweden the only word for them is "diskett" in singular (or "disketter" in plural). And for definite forms (that is the "the"-form, Swedish uses suffixes for that rather than a separate word): "disketten" (singular) and "disketterna" (plural).

[dlq84]

Please support floppies. They aren't practical, but digital recovery and preservation makes it a necessity.

There's hardware floppy emulators such as Gotek ones, but sometimes you need to read something from a damn floppy.

The same about ancient and unused filesystems, there's a niche for being able to read them natively. And recovery companies are extremely expensive.

No one is going to delete old kernel versions from existence. So there shouldn't be any need to worry even if future kernel versions remove support.

[K8p6RxyM]

(Though, if you're using them for archival, as I was before I got a forensic/archival controller, buy a couple and use them with ddrescue. Just like with vintage drives, minute calibration differences can make the difference between a disk reading or not reading and I have one USB drive that read about 95% of my non-bad disks without issue and another that can't read as many, but was great for the 5% the first one had trouble with... funny enough, the latter, which can't read as many marginal disks, seems to have the same calibration as the vintage floppy drive in my retro PC.)

I used old non-usb drives, but similar process with ddrescue to create image files of my 3.5" disks.
Unreadable sectors would sometimes become readable by simply ejecting and re-inserting the disk in the same drive. And by using other drives, more sectors could be recovered.
Some diskette brands are better than others. Most 30+ years old Sony disks were fully recoverable but TDK had many bad sectors and some were very noisy (one drive even got destroyed by such a disk).

[uxmkt]

Some of you ever called those "diskettes" back then? We did it here in Brazil, but I don't remember reading or hearing English speakers calling those "diskettes", just "floppies".

That's because English is the oddball; Wikipedia diplomatically phrases it so: “Productive diminutives are infrequent to nonexistent in Standard English”.

[rickyx]

Some of you ever called those "diskettes" back then? We did it here in Brazil, but I don't remember reading or hearing English speakers calling those "diskettes", just "floppies".

In italian dischetti! It seems that in europe the preferred root was disk...

[Anvil]

WoW , i thought Floppies were Dead

[xen0n]

Some of you ever called those "diskettes" back then? We did it here in Brazil, but I don't remember reading or hearing English speakers calling those "diskettes", just "floppies".

Late to the party; it seems almost everyone's native language adopts the "diskette" i.e. "small disk" form. Not the case in Chinese though; it's always been "软盘" (Simplified) or "軟碟" (Traditional) here, and both mean "soft plate/disk" -- in a sense, closer to "floppy disk" than "small disk".

(I think this is mainly because at the time computers were introduced to common Chinese families and shops, hard disks are already widely available and affordable, so people naturally adopted the "hard/soft" distinction which is very easy to remember. Also, most Chinese at the time only ever saw 3.5-inch floppies, so they didn't have the 5.25-inch or even larger counterparts to compare with either. So it's "soft disk" even though 3.5-inch floppies have hard casings and is in no way "floppy".)

[CochainComplex]

nice a pack of 3d printed save buttons. ...
Memories. my dream as kid had been those super capacity drives (whilst still remaining to the 3,5" size) with 3 to 5 mb instead of the 1,4mb.

Who else is appreciating the sound of old mac floppydrives? PC ones sounded always like screaming when working but the Apple drives sounded fuller and more rounded.
I think they have been all produced by sony(?)*

*once I have had a pc floppy drive made by sony which sounded exactly the same.