Please have a look at this thread from the hardware forums...

thanks,
erich

I am new. I am looking forward to resolving my problem, but even more, I am anxious to learn about how kernel modules are put together on the system. This is a big piece missing from my linux education.

New Inspiron 8500. I haven't had a need to use the floppy drive before, but now I need to cook some debian installation disks.

When I first build linux on my device, much of the hardware was too new to be found in a vanilla installation. I downloaded a kernel RPM that applied many patches. The kernel version is 2.4.20-19.9.acpi.5. Apparenltly, support for the floppy was not compiled in, or there is simply no driver support for my brand of device.

according to Dell, my device is: Assembly, Floppy Drive, 1.44M, 3.5" Form Factor, Universal Serial Bus, NEC, DMOD , which means that they smoke crack, because my floppy is clearly IDE.

'dmesg | grep floppy' gives me...
floppy0: no floppy controllers found
ide-floppy driver 0.99.newide
ide-floppy driver 0.99.newide

I'm not really sure what the second two lines are...

'lspci' shows that my kernel has no clue what the device is..
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corp. 82845 845 (Brookdale) Chipset Host Bridge (rev 04)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corp. 82845 845 (Brookdale) Chipset AGP Bridge (rev 04)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801DB USB (Hub #1) (rev 03)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801DB USB (Hub #2) (rev 03)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801DB USB (Hub #3) (rev 03)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801DB USB EHCI Controller (rev 03)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corp. 82801BAM/CAM PCI Bridge (rev 83)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corp.: Unknown device 24cc (rev 03)
00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corp.: Unknown device 24ca (rev 03)
00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corp. 82801DB AC'97 Audio (rev 03)
00:1f.6 Modem: Intel Corp. 82801DB AC'97 Modem (rev 03)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation: Unknown device 0286 (rev a1)
02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4401 100Base-T (rev 01)
02:01.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments: Unknown device ac44 (rev 02)
02:01.1 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments: Unknown device 8029

Kay, so I try to load the driver manually... I do a 'modprobe floppy' and I get response:
modprobe: Can't locate module floppy

This means that floppy.o is not found. when I do a 'locate floppy.o' I find it, but it's under an experimental 2.6 kernel, that I'm not running. It looks like the module was never build for my kernel.

I do a 'locate floppy', and floppy.c, floppy.h, etc is all in my present kernel source tree. it just didn't get built. There is nothing glaring in the diiferences in the .config files in the kernel source.

How do I go about troubleshooting this? IS there some kernel config modification I need to make?