Mysterious Floppy Drive Error
My office desktop has a floppy drive. The device is a combination Mitsumi Multi-card reader and floppy drive.
I do not recall using the floppy drive for the past few years. I use the device to access SD cards.
Some time ago I noticed one of those typically useless error messages in my system logs:
end_request: I/O error, dev fd0, sector 0
Searching the web failed to produce a meaningful solution to quash the message.
I could pull the power or data cable for the floppy drive to end the mysterious error messages. Doable as I have not used the floppy drive in a few years. Yet I dislike sledge hammer solutions.
A little testing showed the error message occurred only when the floppy drive is empty. When I insert and mount a floppy disk I cannot replicate the error message.
The error message always appeared concurrently when I ran one of my backup scripts. That provided me a primary clue. Further digging revealed the error message was caused by the blkid command. More testing revealed fdisk command would produce the same error message. I am guessing there is a common shared library that actually contains the mysterious message.
The message is harmless but clutters the logs. The only solution I have found to avoid the useless message is not using blkid and fdisk. I haven’t updated all scripts using these commands. For the specific backup script that helped me learn that blkid was a trigger, I am now using the lsblk command. In that script I was using the blkid to determine the file system type. The lsblk command provides that information too.
Posted: Category: Usability Tagged: General
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