Difficulties in creating a PS/2 reference disk

[cbmeeks]

Recently, a very nice PS/2 Model 50 Z has come into my possession.

Turns out you can't just go into the BIOS like you can on other x86 based machines. In fact, you need to boot off the reference disk from IBM.
I downloaded the disk from IBM (amazing it's still available!) but I cannot seem to write this image to an actual disk.

My system is Linux and I have a USB floppy drive. I tried writing the image to the disk like so:

sudo dd if=rf5060a.img of=/dev/sdc bs=512 conv=sync ; sync

"rf5060a.img" is the image I downloaded and I confirmed that /dev/sdc is my floppy drive. After I run the command, it appears to work. I hear the drive spinning and I get no error messages. However, the disk remains blank.
As a test I copied a small text file to the disk and that seemed to work. Which tells me the drive should be working just fine and the disk should be fine.

I can only find two 1.44MiB disks at the moment and they both exhibit the same behavior.

Any ideas what might be going wrong?

Thanks!

 

[ajacocks]

Your dd command ought to work, though I don’t use ‘conv=sync’ when writing mine, and the ‘sync’ at the end isn’t needed, since you’re raw-writing to a device.

Are you seeing any errors in the system log?

You could try using balena etcher to write the image, as that is available on most Linux distributions as a package (https://etcher.balena.io/)

- Alex

 

[cbmeeks]

I tried without the sync bit and the same thing. The system logs don't seem to show any issues with it. In fact, I don't see errors anywhere with it. I might try that belena. But if you're using dd, then I wonder why mine isn't working.

Thanks.

**UPDATE**

I tried Balena and it said successful. But the disk still shows empty.
One of my disks (out of the two) reported I/O errors. I might see if I can find other disks.

 

[ajacocks]

The only thing that I can think of is that the device you are writing to isn't the USB floppy drive. Are you sure that it is 'sdc'? Can you do an 'lsusb' and an 'lsblk' with the USB floppy drive connected?

- Alex

 

[cbmeeks]

Yes, I'm sure. I can see and hear the drive spinning.
This is what lsblk reports:

NAME        FSTYPE FSVER LABEL                 UUID                                 FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINTS
sdc         vfat   FAT12 PS2REF                7716-7D8A                               1.4M     0% /run/media/cbmeeks/PS2REF

BTW, the disk it "wrote" is in the drive now and it reports 0% use.

On another note, I can read some of my other floppies in Linux so I believe the drive itself is good. But I admit I don't have a lot of confidence in USB floppies.

 

[Makefile]

You might try ufiformat to do a format of the disk.

USB floppy drive aren't well supported on Linux even on my Debian installation where you would think they would test such things. It's not that they aren't supported, but that systemd and udevd stuff has a bunch of junk that immediately pounces on the drive frantically trying to access it and automount it as soon as it is attached, and you might also try checking /sys/block/sdc/events_poll_msecs as your kernel might be constantly polling the drive as well (try with no disk in and see if it is accessed literally every second). None of that should stop you from writing the image but it certainly doesn't help.

 

[cbmeeks]

You're right about the constantly polling. I took the disk out and thought to myself...is Linux just like Amiga? LOL

I'm doing a raw format with ufiformat now...

 

[ajacocks]

Make sure that you unmount the USB floppy drive before you dd/Balena flash it, and then re-mount it after you flash.

- Alex

 

[cbmeeks]

Well, ufiformat seemed to work. I unmounted the disk, formatted it, flashed it with both dd and balena, mounted...and still blank.

FYI, I was wrong about IBM providing this disk. It was from "IBMFILES". Not affiliated with IBM.
Anyway, the image I am trying to download is below. I assume this is a proper disk image.

ibmfiles.com

 

[Makefile]

cmp -l /dev/sdc rf5060a.img

 

[cbmeeks]

cmp -l /dev/sdc rf5060a.img

cmp: EOF on rf5060a.img after byte 221184

 

[cbmeeks]

Weird, everything about the commands seem to work just fine. But the disk is blank.
Here is what dd reports after I did another format:

432+0 records in
432+0 records out
221184 bytes (221 kB, 216 KiB) copied, 24.192 s, 9.1 kB/s

 

[Makefile]

are you sure the disk image is only 221K?

 

[Chuck(G)]

Got a URL for the image? I'm sitting in front of my Debian system now and can give it a try.

 

[cbmeeks]

are you sure the disk image is only 221K?

The image is 221,184 bytes.

Got a URL for the image? I'm sitting in front of my Debian system now and can give it a try.

http://ibmfiles.com/ibmfiles/ps2/hamilton/rf5060a.zip

Thanks!

 

[Makefile]

Decompresses to 1.44MB for me, must be truncated on your end

 

[Chuck(G)]

No problem that I can see. I ran this as superuser:

root@Columbia:/home/chuck# ufiformat -f 1440 /dev/sdc
geometry: track=80, head=2, sector=18, block=512
done                                   
root@Columbia:/home/chuck# dd if=/tmp/rf5060a.img of=/dev/sdc
2880+0 records in
2880+0 records out
1474560 bytes (1.5 MB, 1.4 MiB) copied, 157.523 s, 9.4 kB/s

Mounting the drive, I get:

root@Columbia:/home/chuck# ls /media/chuck/0D7C-13D1/
@8EFE.ADF     @DDFF.ADF     @EFEF.ADF	  MEMORY.DGS	SC.EXE
@8EFF.ADF     @DEFF.ADF     ESDI.DGS	  MODEM.DGS	SCSI.DGS
ASYNC.DGS     DF7FF.ADF     @FEFE.ADF	  MOUSE.DGS	SCSIHF.DGS
BACKUP.EXE    @DF9F.ADF     HARDFILE.DGS  MPCA.DGS	SETCLOCK.COM
C8EFE.ADF     DFBFF.ADF     IBMBIO.COM	  NETWORK.DGS	SETRATE.COM
C8EFF.ADF     DIAGS.COM     IBMCACHE.COM  PARA.DGS	SF7FF.ADF
CDDFF.ADF     DISKETTE.DGS  IBMCACHE.SYS  PARKHEAD.COM	SFBFF.ADF
CDF9F.ADF     DSPREVL.EXE   IBMCONN.DGS   PASSWORD.COM	SHARE.EXE
CEF7F.ADF     DUAL.DGS	    IBMDOS.COM	  PF7FF.ADF	UPDATE.EXE
CFEFE.ADF     @E1FF.ADF     INSTALL.COM   PFBFF.ADF	USERINT.EXE
CMD.COM       @E7FF.ADF     JF7FF.ADF	  PLANAR.DGS	VGA.DGS
COMMAND.COM   @EDFF.ADF     JFBFF.ADF	  POSTERR.COM
CONFIG.SYS    @EEFF.ADF     KP.COM	  POSTEXT.ADF
COPROC.DGS    @EF7F.ADF     KYBD.DGS	  PRO200.DGS
DASDDRVR.SYS  @EF7F.DGS     LLFORMAT.COM  RECV35.COM

My system is:

Linux Columbia 5.10.0-23-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 5.10.179-1 (2023-05-12) x86_64 GNU/Linux

 

[cbmeeks]

Ugh. That's pretty much what I'm doing. I use Fedora but I can't imagine that has anything to do with it.

Until I can figure this out, I don't suppose I could get those files zipped up and I will manually put them on the disk?

Or, better yet, how can I decompress the image? I tried Peazip but it didn't recognize the file.

Thanks to everyone for your help!

 

[cbmeeks]

No problem that I can see. I ran this as superuser:

root@Columbia:/home/chuck# ufiformat -f 1440 /dev/sdc
geometry: track=80, head=2, sector=18, block=512
done                                 
root@Columbia:/home/chuck# dd if=/tmp/rf5060a.img of=/dev/sdc
2880+0 records in
2880+0 records out
1474560 bytes (1.5 MB, 1.4 MiB) copied, 157.523 s, 9.4 kB/s

Looks like you copied the entire 1.44MiB. Mine doesn't get that far. I'm really starting to think I just have some bad disks. I'm going to see if I can find others.

**UPDATE**

I found some more floppies. I'll try those and report back.

 

[Chuck(G)]

I think if you can get the boot sector right, you could probably copy the files off onto a disk. If you want to try, I haven't tossed this floppy yet and I'll be happy to zip the files up for you. I did use a new disk.
The .img file isn't compressed--it's a literal sector-by-sector image. You can mount it using the loop device