2001-Jan-02

To view Microsoft Word documents in pine, I setup a .mailcap with:

Application/MSWORD ; strings %s ; copiousoutput

(I am not sure where the keywords, like "copiousoutput" are defined. Another keyword is "needsterminal".)

Later, trying to use old 5.25" floppy under FreeBSD 4.3-RELEASE. I had to set "vfs.usermount" sysctl to 1 (even though I was group operator and the /dev/fd0* files were writable by operator group). (I had never used this drive before.)

Then I received:

Jan  3 02:38:46 k3 /kernel: fd0c: hard error reading fsbn 0 of 0-3 (ST0 40<abnrml> ST1 1<no_am> ST2 0 cyl 0 hd 0 sec 1)

I read this could be caused by "using the wrong density device node, as in trying to read a 720 KB floppy with the 1.44 MB device." dmesg said "fd0: <1440-KB 3.5" drive> on fdc0 drive 0" -- this should be a 5.25" drive and probably 1200 or 720KB.

Okay, I rebooted and changed BIOS to use 1.2 MB 5.25 floppy for floppy A; dmesg reported: "fd0: <1200-KB 5.25" drive> on fdc0 drive 0". Same error again! So i changed BIOS again to 360 KB 5.25 floppy and kernel said "fd0: <360-KB 5.25" drive> on fdc0 drive 0". But same hard error again.

The AMIBIOS didn't have an option for 720KB 5.25 floppy; and the kernel said "720-KB 3.5" drivefd0 on fdc0 drive 0". And then mount had same error again.

So I tried the drive in a newer Award BIOS box; when I changed the BIOS to 720K 5.25 floppy the BIOS halted with error 40. Then I chose 1.2 MB. The Linux 2.2.13 kernel said "Floppy drive(s): fd0 is 1.2M". After loading the msdos module, I was able to mount the floppies (which contained old journal entries and my code from the 1980's).