I must not be asking Google the correct words. What do I need to have installed to read a msdos formatted floppy?

I can format a floppy (superformat), I can read that same floppy and the windows computer can read the floppy that is superformated. But, I cannot read a windows formatted floppy in the linux computer.

Can someone help or at least point me in the right direction.

You need to mount floppies before Debian can read them. (See "man mount".) For mounting floppies you need to have a line for /dev/fd0 in your /etc/fstab and to mount floppies as a normal user you need to belong to the "floppy" group. You also need to unmount the mounted floppy before taking it off, so you won't lose any data.

Or you can install mtools, which can read vfat formatted floppies without mounting. (After installation check out "man mtools".) You can also format floppies with mtools easily: just type from the command line. Also, there's a special file manager for mtools, called MToolsFM and you can install both mtools and MToolsFM with a single command: Hope this helps.

Thanks,


MToolsFM reads the msdos formatted floppy just fine, how come xfe cannot. Xfe says "could not determine the filesystem type".

I think Xfe reads your fstab to mount floppy disks, so you should probably check /etc/fstab if you prefer to mount with Xfe. Check that the <mount point> directory mentioned in fstab (something like /media/floppy0) actually exists. If it doesn't exist, you need to create it.

Here is my /etc/fstab

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hda1 / ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 1
/dev/hda5 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/hdb /media/cdrom0 iso9660 ro,user,noauto 0 0
/dev/hdc /media/cdrom1 iso9660 ro,user,noauto 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy0 auto rw,user,noauto 0 0

Make the last line look like this:

Deadparrot your a genius,
now for another question why did that make a difference it would seem to me that auto would encompass all formats, or am i mistaken.

I don't know the details but mounting arbitrary "auto" filesystem only seems to work as the root user. Normal users need to specify a filesystem or else mount won't work.