external usb floppy drive won't work
 

We are using RH9 on a laptop and so far so good. I attach an external usb zip drive and it works fine. I attach an external usb floppy drive and it doesn't work. When I look at dmesg I see the drive is recognized and assigned /dev/sdb but I don't know which sdb device - so I first tried sdb4 but results in errors, as do all the other sdb* devices I tried. The message is-

wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb4 or too many mounted file systems

I get the same message whether I try sdb4, sdb3, sdb2, or sdb1. As I mentioned the external usb zip drive does work fine.

The mount command I have tried is
/mount -t msdos /dev/sdb4 /mnt/floppy

I also tried it without the -t msdos but that results in an error -
not a valid block device

What do I have to do to get this doggone Addonics floppy drive to work?

are you 100% sure its sdb?
I havn't used a usb floppy drive b4, but you could see what the following gives you;

cdrecord --scanbus

just a thought...

I did also try sda_ and sdc_ where the _ is 1,2,3 or 4. They all gave the same results as using sdb_. I can't do any more on that machine because it was shipped to the customer ups red last night. I was hoping this forum would provide a faster reply, what with some purported 80000 users. Oh well. That's the breaks sometimes.
Thanks anyway.