[Mageia-discuss] Can't access floppy drive

[TJ]

A Gnome user brought this up on a.o.l.mageia and a.o.l.mandriva. The 
issue, apparently, affects both distros. Both of us are using the 32-bit 
Mageia 1. I can't speak for him, but here is my problem:

I don't do it often at all, but what I'd like to be able to do is have 
Dolphin detect when I put a floppy in the drive and add that to the 
Places panel, just as it now does when I put a CD or DVD in one of those 
drives. As it is now, when I put a floppy in the drive, nothing happens.

lsmod shows that the floppy module is present. My fstab shows this for 
the floppy:

> /dev/fd0 /media/floppy auto umask=0,users,iocharset=utf8,noauto,exec,flush 0 0

I can't even seem to be able to mount it by hand. $ mount /media/floppy 
appears to work. At least, the drive spins and the busy LED comes on for 
a while, then goes off. But, nothing shows in /media/floppy, and if I 
give the mount command again without unmounting the drive, it still works.

But, $ mount /media/floppy; mount /media/floppy results in these error 
messages:

> mount: /dev/fd0 already mounted or /media/floppy busy
> mount: according to mtab, /dev/fd0 is already mounted on /media/floppy

But if I look at mtab, the floppy isn't there. And giving the mount 
command again, on a separate line, produces no errors.

It's as if the drive is mounted, then unmounted almost immediately. Or 
as if the driver didn't allow enough time for the disk to be read before 
deciding it couldn't be mounted.

BTW, Windows XP, on the same hardware and with the same floppy, has no 
problem with access. This is an old-style floppy drive, connected to the 
motherboard. It is not usb.

Any ideas?

TJ