Name¶
floppymeter - measure raw capacity and exact rotation speed of floppy drive
Note¶
This manpage has been automatically generated from fdutils's texinfo
documentation. However, this process is only approximative, and some items,
such as cross-references, footnotes and indices are lost in this translation
process. Indeed, these items have no appropriate representation in the manpage
format. Moreover, only the items specific to each command have been
translated, and the general information about fdutils has been dropped in the
manpage version. Thus I strongly advise you to use the original texinfo doc.
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- To generate a printable copy from the texinfo doc, run the following
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./configure; make dvi; dvips fdutils.dvi
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A pre-made HTML can be found at: `http://www.tux.org/pub/knaff/fdutils'
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The texinfo doc looks most pretty when printed or as HTML. Indeed, in the info
version certain examples are difficult to read due to the quoting conventions
used in info.
Description¶
floppymeter [-f] [-w warmup-delay] [-W window]
[-c cycles] [-h] drive
The floppymeter program measures characteristic parameters of a floppy drive and
floppy controller, such as the rotation speed of the drive, the data transfer
rate of the controller, and the resulting raw capacity of a disk track. To use
this program, insert a disposable floppy in the drive, and type floppymeter --
density, where density describes the density of the disk used for the
test. (Should be one of dd, hd or ed).
CAUTION: the data on the disk
will be erased. This program should be used to verify whether the drive
and controller are out of tolerance if you experience problems with some high
capacity formats. It only needs to be run once per drive: although a disk is
needed to perform the measurements, the measured data only depend on the drive
and the controller, and not on the disk.
To measure the raw capacity of the disk track, the floppymeter program formats
the first track of the drive in a special way that allows it to read the raw
data (gaps and headers) of the disk.
Thus, all data previously
stored on that disk is lost.
The rotation speed is measured by timing the return time of a readid command. In
order to gain more precision, the command is issued many times in a row.
During this phase, the number of rotations since the start of the test, the
average time per rotation since the start, and a sliding average of the times
of the last 30 rotations is printed, and updated continuously.
The data transfer rate is deduced from the two parameters above.
At the end of the program, all parameters (raw capacity, duration of one
rotation, and data transfer rate) are printed again, as well as their relative
deviation to the standard value. Finally, it suggests a capacity deviation
description line, which can be directly pasted into the drive definition file
(See section Drive descriptions.).
Usually, the data transfer rate should not deviate more than 150 ppm from the
expected value, and the rotation speed of the drive should not deviate more
than 3000 ppm from the expected value. If these deviations are bigger, you may
get problems with certain high capacity formats.
If the raw capacity of the drive is too small, some high capacity formats may
become unformattable on this drive/controller combo.
If on the other hand, the raw capacity of the drive is too big, you may get
problems when writing to a disk formatted by this drive on another drive with
a smaller raw capacity. In order to avoid this, increase superformats gap
parameter (-G).
- -h
- Prints a short help
- --dd
- Tells the program that we use a Double Density disk.
- --hd
- Tells the program that we use a High Density disk.
- --ed
- Tells the program that we use an Extra Density disk.
- -f
- Runs the measurement non interactively. With this option, the program
doesn't ask for confirmation, and doesn't display the continuously updated
values during the rotation speed measurement.
- -W Window
- This value describes how many rotations are used for the computation of
the sliding average. Default is 30.
- -c cycles
- Describes the number of rotations clocked during the rotations speed
determination test. Default is 1000.
Bugs¶
This program is quite new, and may have bugs. Here are a few suggested tests to
check its sanity:
- *
- The deviation of the data transfer rate solely depends on the controller.
It should not be different between two drives connected to the same
controller. However, the drive rotation speed may be different for
different drives.
- *
- All data transfer rates (for double, high and extra density) are derived
from a same master frequency. Thus the deviation of the data
transfer rate should be independent of the density used.
See Also¶
Fdutils' texinfo doc