[Mageia-discuss] Can't access floppy drive

[TJ]

On 01/31/2012 06:28 AM, Anne Wilson wrote:

> Not smarter, but probably been around longer :-)  So few people use
> floppies these days and I suspect that udev doesn't pick up the
> existence of the drive.  What I'd try is to get a line into /etc/fstab
> to mount the drive at boot.  You will need to keep a floppy in the
> drive, I think, so start by rebooting with a disk inserted, once you
> have your fstab sorted - you should find some help from a google
> search "linux floppy mount drive".
>
> Once you have it working, make a spare floppy that is unimportant, to
> keep in the drive for bootup.
>
> Sheer guesswork, but I think that should fix it.  You should be able
> to mount and umount the drive in dolphin, to allow you to change
> disks.
>
Now, I'm not very knowledgeable in this area, but it seems strange that 
if udev doesn't detect the drive that anything would happen at all when 
I attempt to mount the drive manually. Yet it does. A simple $ mount 
/media/floppy results in a drive that spins, but doesn't mount. And a $ 
mount /media/floppy; mount /media/floppy gives a message that the drive 
was indeed mounted at the time of the second command, but it doesn't 
seem to still be mounted by the time the prompt appears for another command.

My system has a problem with keeping a floppy in the drive. I still have 
the floppy in the boot order, before going to the hard drive. If there 
is a boot floppy in the drive, the system will boot from it. If a 
non-boot floppy is in the drive, the BIOS (I assume) identifies it, 
effectively says "HUH? Now what?" and waits for an answer before 
continuing.

While I could remove the floppy from the boot order, since I haven't 
booted from a floppy except for testing purposes in a very long time, 
I'd still like to retain the option, just in case. And while it isn't 
the end of the world to have to tell my computer to continue every time 
I boot even though there is a confusing (to it) floppy in the drive, 
it's an annoyance I'd rather not have.

So while your suggestion for a workaround is appreciated, I use my 
floppy far too infrequently to do that all the time. However, I will 
file it away as something to try, because on those rare occasions when I 
DO want to use a floppy, I can just pop one in the drive and reboot.

Rebooting so I can continue working sounds somehow very Microsoft-like, 
but whatever works...

TJ