I'm stumped with an issue with FC11. Extensive googling has yielded no results and 'man' pages haven't been much help.

The issue is that under GNOME in the "Places" menu, or in the "Computer" window, the floppy drive does not appear. There is no way in the GNOME Desktop to mount a floppy, aside from the command line.

I can mount the floppy manually and use the disk.
I can mount the floppy using the command 'gnome-mount -d /dev/fd0', and a floppy drive icon appears in the "places" menu, and under "computer". Also, the "disk mounter" applet will display an icon. I can use these to browse the disk and unmount.

The problem is, that as soon as I unmount, the icon disappears, and there is no way through the GUI to bring it back.

KDE4 has a similar problem. Dolphin? has an icon to mount I believe, but you can't unmount.

Having used RedHat 7.3, I know that it is possible to have an icon where you can mount/unmount and browse floppy drives.

How can I make the icon persistant in Gnome?
How can I get some equivalent in KDE?

It's pretty frustrating that something so basic doesn't work. devkit-disks shows no floppy drive, and I have no idea how to configure this program.

Any help appreciated. I just want to be able to mount/unmount in either GNOME or KDE4 (preferably both).

Thanks,
Borax Man

PS: I have just discovered that unmounting the floppy manually causes the light to stay on, and dmesg to report an I/O error if I eject the disk. So it doesn't unmount properly (and is causing file loss).

PPS I know floppys are outdated, but I still have a requirement for them at the moment.

fedora and Gnome are moving away from the very old 3.5 flopy

what is listed in your /etc/mtab and /etc/fstab files for "fd0"

and is autofs installed ( default i believe is not installed -- fedora is using hal )

from /etc/mtab

There is no line regarding fd0 in mtab

and from etc/fstab

$ /dev/fd0 /media/floppy vfat noauto,users 0 0

The problems is worse that I thought. Writing to the floppy doesn't work. The light stays on after the write operation, the data isn't written properly.

fdformat /dev/fd0 returns
Could not determine current format type: No such device

and mformat a: returns
mformat: Could not get geometry of device (No such device)

I have these messages from 'dmesg'

floppy0: probe failed...
end_request: I/O error, dev fd0, sector 0
floppy0: probe failed...
floppy0: probe failed...
floppy0: probe failed...
floppy0: probe failed...
floppy0: probe failed...
floppy0: probe failed...
end_request: I/O error, dev fd0, sector 0
floppy0: probe failed...
floppy0: probe failed...
floppy0: probe failed...
floppy0: probe failed...
floppy0: probe failed...

Any "read only" operation seems to work OK. The floppy drive is brand new, and works fine under Windows XP (I can copy files to it and reformat it), so it's not a hardware issue but something specific with FC11.

I'm using a 64 bit kernel.
I can deal with manually mounting, but I can't deal with the floppy drive not working.

I'm not sure if the geometry is set wrong, or what. The thing is, with my last Linux box, I was able to change floppy device settings. Now with kernel 2.6, everything is automagically set up, but the magic leaves much to be desired.

So I'm thinking the issue is with the kernel? (I've compiled my own, it made no difference), or with udev.