[Mageia-discuss] Can't access floppy drive

[Paul Simon]

I see from your note that it has not been answered yet.  I have the same 
problem with both Mandriva and Mageia but am not as advanced in Linux as you 
are.  Let's hope there is someone smarter than we are who can help us, and 
then add the few lines of code so that we who still use floppies can 
continue in our old ways.

Paul Simon
"TJ" <andrewsfarm at gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:jg1nen$4r8$1 at dough.gmane.org...
>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
>
>