mounting fd0 without a floppy gives a GPF

mounting fd0 without a floppy gives a GPF

I found my first GPF in FreeBSD tonight.  I was trying to mount a floppy drive so I could copy files from one system to another, but I forgot to insert the floppy.   Big mistake.

First it timed out.  Fair enough.  There’s no floppy there.  So I insert the floppy and try again.  WOW! 

isa_dmastart: channel 2 busy
Fatal trap 9: general protection fault while in kernel mode

And I could reproduce it. UGLY.

I’ll track this down sometime and find out what’s really going on there.

31 July 1998

It turns out that this is normal behaviour.  The trick is to not remove the floppy before unmounting it.  And make sure it’s in there before you mount it.