bug with 2M floppy discs

[Luis Bustamante]

       Hi all.

       I'm  currently maintaining  the mtools  package for  the Debian
GNU/Linux distribution, and a couple a months ago we received a bug at
the  Debian  Bugtracking  System  regarding  formating  of  2M  floppy
discs. I digged  into the code but I wasn't unable  to figure out what
is the  exact problem (according to  the bug sender, it  wasn't in 3.8
release). Here's the report:


From: Tuukka Toivonen <address@hidden>
To: Debian Bug Tracking System <address@hidden>
Subject: mtools: mformat writes invalid data to floppy with 2M format
X-Reportbug-Version: 1.43
X-Mailer: reportbug 1.43
Date: Mon, 25 Feb 2002 20:35:18 +0200
Message-Id: <address@hidden>

Package: mtools
Version: 3.9.8-7
Severity: important

I usually formatted my floppy disks with:
        superformat /dev/fd0 tracksize=23b mss 2m ssize=2KB cyl=82
This calls mformat as:
        mformat -s23 -t82 -h2 -S4 -M512 -2 18 a:
However, after the mformat command the floppy is unreadable.

I tried older version of mformat (mtools-3.8) and this release doesn't show
the buggy behaviour. Comparing the output of strace as ran with both
versions I get:
write(3, "\353\200\2202M-STV04\0\2\1\1\0\2\260\0\274\16\360\v\0\27"..., 512)
for old (working) version and
write(3, "\353~\2202M-STV04\0\2\1\1\0\2\260\0\274\16\360\v\0\27\0"..., 512)
for new buggy version. Since there is little other difference,
I believe the problem is here: \200 is replaced incorrectly with ~.
[But no patch included--couldn't find where in the code it calls write]

-- System Information
Debian Release: 3.0
Architecture: i386
Kernel: Linux s-inf-pc24 2.2.20-udma100-ext3 #1 SMP Wed Dec 5 08:48:38 CET 2001 
i686
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=fi_FI


        Kind regards, thanks for your help.


References:
1. http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=135713&repeatmerged=yes


-- 
Luis Bustamante
CSO, Fluid Signal S.A.