floppies

anyone else having trouble with floppies?  I tried a bunch of
different disks in two different machines (5.1-CURRENT with brand new
drive, 4.9-PRERELEASE with an older but presumed-good drive) and all I
get are I/O errors; fdformat sometimes works and sometimes doesn't,
and any attempt to actually read or write data fails.

# uname -a
FreeBSD ada.des.no 4.9-PRERELEASE FreeBSD 4.9-PRERELEASE #5: Fri Sep  5 22:56:22 CEST 2003     des_at_ada.des.no:/usr/src/sys/compile/ada  i386
# fdformat fd0
Format 1440K floppy `/dev/fd0'? (y/n): y
Processing fdformat: ioctl(FD_FORM): Input/output error
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/fd0c
dd: /dev/fd0c: Input/output error
1+0 records in
0+0 records out
0 bytes transferred in 2.634334 secs (0 bytes/sec)

and the console shows:

fd0: recal failed ST0 70<abnrml,seek_cmplt,equ_chck> cyl 0
last message repeated 2 times
fd0: recal failed ST0 78<abnrml,seek_cmplt,equ_chck,drive_notrdy> cyl 0
fd0c: hard error writing fsbn 0 (No status)

on -CURRENT:

# fdformat fd0
Format 1440K floppy `/dev/fd0'? (y/n): y
Processing VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVEVVVVVV done.
Errors encountered:
Cyl Head Sect   Error
 66    1   12   wrong cylinder (format mismatch)

(although a previous run succeeded)

I'm having a hard time believing this is a hardware problem, although
there might conceivably be an environmental factor which affects both
systems since they are in the same room.

DES
-- 
Dag-Erling Smørgrav - des_at_des.no