mounting floppy hangs PC
 

Hi all

Well, the topic says all....I'm not able to mount any floppy disk, as i press the enter on the "mount /mnt/floppy" command, all the system is hanged up, so reset button must be pressed.

Here's my entry on the fstab, i think is correct, but anyway....

/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner,kudzu 0 0

I don't know if putting the "user" option will help....

Any ideas?

Thanx in advance

What type of motherboard do you have? What kernel are you running? What does the dmesg say about the detection of the floppy drive?

The motherboard is ASUS P4S8X-X. I use kernel 2.4.22 "custom made" and dmesg recognise the floppy

Floppy drive(s): fd0 is 1.44M

There are no error messages pointing to fd0....

Weird. This is something new -- I haven't got a clue what to try next.

Can you mount the floppy from the command line rather than using the gui? Either as root or a standard user? Are there any diagnostic messages in /var/log/messages? What do you mean exactly when you say "hang"? Do you have another machine from which you can access the hung machine? If a command line mount hangs, you might try from run level 3. Also, have you verified that the floppies you are trying to mount are viable --- do they work on another machine? What is their format?

OK, that is all for now.

Ok, let's go for parts....
I always mount in console. i don't use automount
I never tried in root mode, but i think it will happen the same (i will try)
I was unable to find anything usefull in /var/log/messages....
When i mean hang up, i mean that NOTHING is responding, the only way to reboot the computer is via reset button.
Unfortunately, i haven't any more PCs to check out....
The floppies works on windows (dual boot RH9 - WinXP) and are vfat format.

I'm a newbie, could you explain to me how i can do it in run level 3?

Thanks for all the effort you're taking in this.

To switch to runlevel 3, simply do "telinit 3". Check out "man telinit". I am less inclined to think that X is the problem in that I misread your post and assumed you were using the point and click method. bad. But it still might be worth trying.

Trying as root might be useful, I'll look for the results. It may be related to the "user" option, since on this machine (slackware), I do not have the user option and must be root (sudo usually) to mount a floppy, while on a redhat system I use I do have the user option and do not need root permissions. What is the output of ls -l /dev/fd0?

To see whether it is a floppy problem or a vfat issue with your kernel, the following might work:

"dd if=/dev/fd0 bs=1440 of=/tmp/floppy.image"
"mount -oloop /tmp/floppy/image /mnt/floppy"

You might also try "mount -oloop -tvfat /tmp/floppy/image /mnt/floppy". I've noticed that mtab shows a different option if the type (-tvfat) is explicitly specified. This could BTW be a (tiresome) workaround If you can do this but you can't solve the mount floppy problem itself.