I've been having this problem for a while, but only recently have I decided to try to fix it. I'd like some suggestions as to what I should try.

I ordered my machine from mwave.com by picking out all the hardware piece by piece and then paying them a fee to assemble it all. They installed no operating system on the machine. I had the Fedora Core 1 CDs, so I tried to install from them.

The installation went reasonably smoothly. The only hiccup was when the installer asked if I wanted to make a boot disk. If I selected NO, then the installer froze. If I selected YES, then it tried to write, the little floppy drive light came on, but never went off, and the installer was frozen again. I wondered if the drive was stuck in writing mode or something.

Well, when I rebooted after selecting YES, the operating system was there and all was fine.

Fine, that is, until I tried to write to a floppy. The drive appeared to mount just fine. If I try to cp a text file to /mnt/floppy, the drive light comes on and stays on while the computer freezes.

That was a minor annoyance, because I hardly ever use the floppy drive anyway. The reason I mention the floppy at all is because I noticed that I had problems writing to the CD drive as well, and I wonder if there might be a connection.

I should probably say here that the motherboard (ASUS P4S800) and the CD writer (AOPEN 52/32/52X CDRW) both get high marks when it comes to compatibility with Fedora Core 1.

The problem with the CD writer I have is that, although the writing process appears to work fine, the written file and the original file on my hard drive are not the same (they have different hashes and diff says they're not the same).

I should also mention that I have no problems copying files over the network with scp or with transferring files from my digital camera.

I'm at the point where I think I'll open up my machine to make sure everything is physically installed properly. I'm hoping somebody will give me a few ideas to try before I do that. Could it be that I have some faulty hardware? How should I go about diagnosing which piece is the problem?

Are you able to read floppy disks? If you insert a floppy, does it mount automatically? What does the 'mount' command say after inserting a floppy.
Was the floppy you tried to write to formatted?
Try to unmount the floppy and mount it manually using the /dev/fd1440 device.

If the floppy drive were defective, I think you would be seeing I/O error messages.

Before someone can help you with the digital camera problem, you will need to provide the output of the 'lsmod' command. If it uses a USB interface, does the output of lsusb show the camera device.

There are a number of modules that are needed in order to be able to use a usb storage device. Besides usb modules, the scsi modules must also be loaded.

Does your system use hot-plugging?

I can read floppies and CDs just fine.

I don't have any problems with the digital camera (usb).

My problem is writing: both floppies and CDs.

Which kernel are you using. If it is a 2.4 kernel, you need an entry in the boot parameters, such as "hdc=ide-scsi" if /dev/hdc is your cdrom writer.

You could run as root the 'k3bsetup' program. It will adjust your fstab for you, but you will need to edit the append= line for /etc/lilo.conf and rerun lilo ( assuming you use lilo ).

You need to look at the outputs of: lspci, lsusb, lsmod as well as read through the output of 'dmesg' which shows the boot messages. These messages may tell you if there is a problem with a hardware device, or when loading a module.

Some modules ( probably floppy ) will be built into the kernel. The output of 'cat /proc/devices' will list the devices that are supported by the kernel ( by modules or compiled in ). The 'cat /proc/filesystems' list the filesystems the kernel understands.