Alright, I'm having srious problems. I have an iBM thinkpad 600x,and I already have xp on he system. I eventually succeded in installing mandrake 9.1 an same system, but the mandrake os does not recognise my floppy. I have only one media bay so I switch it between m floppy and dvd/cd-rw.
I tried logging in as root to mount the floppy but didn't succeed .I need some assitance on what todo next.

I have the 600E and inorder to change Media Bay devices, you have to shutdown, linux does not support the hot swapping. Once you shutdown, take out the cdrom drive, and reboot, mandrake should recognize the floppy and then you should be able to mount it.

How did you attempt at mounting the floppy? What was the exact command you used?

like lets assume you have a directory for your floopy called /mnt/floppy
you could try mounting the floppy disk as follows:
mount -t vfat /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy
(this may not be completely syntactically correct; type mount --help to find what you need to do)

this will mount the first floppy disk device to a normal FAT file system, which is the style you'd most likely use for a floppy disk.

and if you want to be able to mount the drive using the command:
mount /mnt/floppy
then you will have to edit your /etc/fstab file to have the neccessary information for it to now how it is supposed to mount.

After rebooting and adding in the floppy drive what happens when you try mount /mnt/floppy and umount /mnt/floppy?

you musnt mount it like that. look in your /etc/fstab to see what the device name is for the floppy. Its normally /dev/fd0 but just make sure. Next use this command:

mount /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy

If its using a disk from a windoze machine then use this command:

mount -t vfat /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy

That should get it mounted. Then look in the /mnt/floppy directory and there you should have all the floppy drive contents.

You can tell I am too used to the icons on the desktop of SuSE 8.2 heh!

Well yes OK thanks for this explanation which of course is correct if I look at the floppy icon properties it does say /dev/fd0

are using Mandrake out of the box? (because supermount is enabled by default)
if you are using KDE, try clicking the floppy icon on the destop.
If on command line, insert the floppy and then just "cd /mnt/floppy" then do a "ls" to get see the contents

(Hope this helps!)

Yes exactly click the icon on the KDE desktop! Properties of the icon say /dev/fd0 so one can either click the icon or type the command:-

mount /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy