NAME¶
fdflush - force floppy disk drive to detect disk change
SYNOPSIS¶
fdflush [device]
DESCRIPTION¶
Fdflush is a band-aid for a common PC hardware problem. Many PC floppy
disk drives can't detect when the disk has been changed. The symptom of this
problem is that when a disk is changed, the drive will continue to read
buffered data from the previous disk rather than new data from the disk
presently in the drive. Running
fdflush makes the system believe the
disk-change switch has been actuated, and the system discards the buffered
blocks in response to this information. If you have one of these
slightly-broken disk drives, you'll have to run
fdflush every time you
change a disk.
The kernel uses two different ioctl commands to flush buffers. One's generic
(BLKFLSBUF), one's floppy-specific (FDFLUSH).
fdflush calls both, and
only reports an error if noth fail.
OPTIONS¶
- device
- The name of the floppy disk device, in the form /dev/fd1 . The
default is /dev/fd0 .
EXIT CODES¶
Zero: success, one: ioctl error, two: inability to open the floppy (or other)
device, three: usage error.
BUGS¶
They're in your hardware. Try swapping in another floppy drive to see if this
problem goes away.
FILES¶
/dev/fd
N floppy disk device.
AUTHOR¶
Bruce Perens
Bruce@Pixar.com .