[Discuss] Floppy with Kubuntu

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2007-05-10 09:54-0700 Murray Strome wrote:

> I am unable to access my floppy drive using Kubuntu.
>
> If I place a disk into the floppy drive, nothing happens.
>
> If I look at /media/floppy0 it says I have 0 files, 0 directories and I 
> cannot write anything to it.
>
> If I look at /etc/fstab the following entry appears twice:
>
> /dev/fd0 /media/floppy0 auto user,atime,noauto,rw,dev,exec,suid 0 0

AFAIK, there is no necessity for two identical entries in /etc/fstab.
Therefore, I would delete one of them if they really are identical.

>
> If I do fdlist, I get the following:
>
> NAME   TYPE  STATUS
> fd0  1440K  not mounted
>
> If I try:  mount /media/floppy0, I get:
> mount: /dev/fd0 is not a valid block device

The above line in /etc/fstab says "rw" which means the device must be
writeable (as well as readable).  Do you have the write protection tab on
the diskette flipped in the correct position?

Also, the diskette must be low-level formatted and a filesystem put on top
of that in order for mount to work.  (Remember, mount always mounts
filesystems...) The first "auto" in the above /etc/fstab line means the
filesystem type is automatically detected during the mount.

The superformat command does both the low-level format and the filesystem
creation (but of course will destroy any prior data on the diskette.).  The
filesystem it uses is MS-DOS (ugh).  That normally requires a kernel module
(which should be automatically loaded).  IIRC, it is called vfat, but check
with lsmod.  If you don't like the MS-DOS filesystem for floppies, you can
overwrite it with ext2 using mkfs.

Note, some Linux system commands do not need the diskette mounted (such as
superformat itself as well as any of the mtools commands (mcopy, etc.)).

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of
Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
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