I almost never used my floppy drive on my Slackware Linux system, so this problem just showed up yesterday.

I have an IBM Thinkpad. Somewhere along the way I read that I should add ' append="floppy=thinkpad" ' to my lilo.conf, so I did.

I guess I haven't used my floppy drive since, until yesterday, when I found that it didn't respond at all. The kernel recognized it, a dev node was created for it, but I couldn't access data, format a floppy, or anything else.

Today I removed the append="floppy=thinkpad" line from lilo.conf, and the floppy drive came back to life.

Maybe the special append line was needed for an older kernel version (I use 2.6.10), or maybe for another Thinkpad model (mine's a T21). Whatever, if your Thinkpad floppy's not working, try *not* telling Linux that your floppy's in a Thinkpad. It might work for you, too.

The "floppy=thinkpad" parameter is valid for older IBM Thinkpad models. My 600E and later 'pads I have tried never needed that special parameter. I do think my 760XD did require that though.


Håkan

Thanks for the explanation. I'm still a little surprised, though, that a Thinkpad-specific option actually breaks a newer Thinkpad's floppy. But, I suppose the person who developed the option a few years ago could't predict the future, and later Thinkpad engineers wouldn't overly worry about accommodating a fairly obscure -- and now obsolete -- lilo option.