A.P. Lawrence

This article is from a FAQ concerning SCO operating systems. While some of the information may be applicable to any OS, or any Unix or Linux OS, it may be specific to SCO Xenix, Open Desktop or Openserver.

There is lots of Linux, Mac OS X and general Unix info elsewhere on this site: Search this site is the best way to find anything.

OSR5 FAQ

I upgraded Merge and now cannot access my floppy drive

David Peet explains:

New to Merge 4.1.1 for OpenServer, the floppy is now accessed in the same way as it is on Merge for Unixware (via the UNIX floppy driver) instead of "direct attached" as it had been done. This change is because on faster machines the direct attach of the floppy often has problems because of timing.

For a Win95 that was installed when direct attach floppy was being used, the registry needs to be updated so that Windows can use the new accesss method.

The problem is that Merge is supposed to update your existing Windows registry when you upgrade to 4.1.1, and this update must have failed insome way. (Any new installation of Windows after the upgrade will not have the problem. It is only an issue of changing the hardware setup for an existing Windows installation.)

What is supposed to happen is that the program

    /usr/lib/merge/bin/upgrade_flop.sh

Either this did not get run automatically or it failed someway. You can retry this by running it. Just running it (with no parameters) will upgrade your regular Windows installation as specified by your "win" personal configuration. If you have other personal windows95 configurations, you need to run this script for each one, using as a parameter the name of the configuration.

If this does not work you have two choices:

1. Reinstall Windows so the new installation will work with the new floppy access method.
2. Change Merge to use direct attach floppy access so old installations of Windows will work as is.
   • Change the MERGE_DIRECT_FLOPPY_ENABLE switch in /etc/default/merge from off to on.
   • Edit /etc/conf/pack.d/merge/space.c and change the value of _M_direct_attach_floppy from 0 to 1 and rebuild a kernel (/etc/conf/cf.d/link_unix -y) and then reboot.
   
   

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