Paivakil

I have two machines here, both exlusively running Debian
Gnu/linux. Multiboot is between various versions of the gnu/linux
kernel. (yes, I know that kernel is not a part of the GNU project, but
GNUS does not allow me to utter the name of the kernel in isolation -
that is a bug which I am going to report).

The problem - floppies do not work on both machines.

Both machines read, files show up, no file is truncated, dosfstools
and dosfsck / fsck.vfat does not report any problem, but copying /
reading files from the floppies is always giving me problems. The cp
command says there are problems reading the files, and fails.
ometimes, I can use the media after running dosfsck.

This is not likely a hardware problem, because occassionally, the same
floppy in the same drive can be read /written to without any problem.

But the same media / floppies read all time in other machines (the
ones running any OS from Microsoft).

Why?