Hi all!

Please bear with me on this. I've read the relevant man pages, searched and read any and all the posts I could find on this subject on more than one forum. I also tried to look it up on Google.com. I know I must've missed it somewhere but I give up, so here goes:

I have Windows 2000 Pro and Mandrake 8.1 installed on my new system. System components info (just in case it's relevant):
EPOX 8KHA+ Retail
AMD TBIRD 1.4GHZ/266 PGA AYHJA OEM
2x DDR 256MB 32X64 PC2100 Crucial = 512MB
MAXTOR DiamondMax Plus D740X 60GB Hard Drive 7200RPM ATA 133 OEM
Gainward/Cardexpert GeForce3 64MB VIVO+DVI Retail
Samsung Syncmaster 700ift 17" Monitor
CD-RW Lite-On 16x10x40 LTR-1610B Retail
DVD-ROM Lite-On 16x/48x LTD-163 Retail
Voyetra Turte Beach Santa Cruz DSP PCI OEM
Boston Acoustics BA4800 4.1 5-piece speaker set
LinkSYS LNE100TX Etherfast 10/100 LAN Card - OEM

I have Mandrake on the last 12 GBytes of my HD. I have the following partitions:

hda0: Windows 2000 C 10GB
hda1: Windows 2000 D 10GB
hda2: Windows 2000 E 28GB
hda7: /boot ~8MB
hda8: / 2GB
hda9: /var 5GB
hda10: /home 3GB
hda11: /tmp 512MB
hda12: /swap 768MB

Pretty much everything works fine except I can't mount the floppy device.

My /etc/fstab has this entry in it:

"/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto
user,iocharset=iso8859-1,unmask=0,sync,exec,codepage=850,noauto 0 0"

I use the following command logged in as root:
"mount dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy"

This is the message I get:
"mount: /dev/fd0: unknown device"

The /var/log/messages file contains this entry afterwards:
"Can't locate module block-major-2"

(Obviously all without the ")

I do not know what to do next. This must be a common problem but it's new to me. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Regards,
3Designer

When you boot, do you see your floppy being loaded? I can't say about your fstab as mine doesn't have an entry for the floppy at all. As for mandrake, it may need one, but it could be that setup didn't find it correctly or you could check to see if floppy support is enabled in the kernel config. You could go to your /dev directory and type a ls fd* and see if there are any block devices of the type. If not you can create one using MAKEDEV. That's the only reason I can see that it would give you the error. Type man MAKEDEV and read what this option does and the options you may need. Hope this did something for you. If anything, print this message and use it for toilet paper. Make sure you use the photo gloss quality.

taz.devil,

Thanks for your help! Just when I gave up on the problem I found the solution. Figures... It was where I should've looked first, the Mandrake Errata on their [website. Anyways, it seems there is a problem with the BIOS not configuring PnP devices. This can be remedied if I type "linux nobiospnp" at the boot prompt. The strange thing is that my BIOS even has a PnP OS setting where I can tell it if the OS should configure PnP devices or the BIOS. This was set to "Disable" which means the BIOS should take care of it but apparently it does not. I also tried "Enable" just to see what happens but it didn't cure the problem.

It'd be nice to know how to make that parameter (nobiospnp) added automagically so I wouldn't have to type it every time I reboot the computer. Does anyone know?

3Designer

Don't take my word for it, since I'm a newbie too, but I believe you can edit the lilo.conf file to add in your boot parameters.

add this to your lilo.conf file just below the 'label=blahblah'

that should get things working nicely

Alex