Problems creating emergency floppies on OpenServer 5 systems with Specialix cards installed

We have become aware of a problem where the emergency (root and boot) floppy disk set creation fails on OpenServer 5, if the system has had Specialix cards installed.

This is due to the default inode allocation in the /usr/lib/mkdev/fd script, being inadequate. The result is that the system cannot complete the initialisation of the ramdisk needed to create the emergency disks.

The solution is to edit the /usr/lib/mkdev/fd script as follows

In vi, search for the line that reads:

/etc/mkfs -y -f EAFS /dev/marry/tmp/ramdisk 5120:1000 >/dev/null 2>&1

and change 1000 to read 1200.

It is important to note that when the floppy creation process fails initially, the file /tmp/ramdisk is left on the system. Additionally, this is left mounted to /mnt.

Before attempting to runmkdev fd again, unmount /mnt and delete the file ramdisk in /tmp. If this is not done, the floppy creation process will fail again with similar results as previous.

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