Floppy problem, differnet error, please help...
 

I have a fresh install of Mandrake 8.1. It doesnt matter if im logged in as root or under a different user i still get the same error message! When I goto mount my floppy by right clicking under gnome and selecting floppy or typing the command in by hand under console i get "/dev/fd0 is not a valid block device" By the way the command im typing is as follows "mount -t (filetype) /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy" where filetype is
vfat, fat, or msdos.... I have tryed them all.(its a blank disk formated under windows using fat filesystem) I read in a post somewhere to change my fstab entry for my floppy from "/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto user,iocharset=iso8859-1,umask=0,sync,exec,codepage=850,noauto 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0" to the following "/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto" when I do this I get "/mnt/floppy does not exist"

Thanks in advance for any help!!!!

There are lots of reson for this one may be that the floppy is corrupted.

The original fstab entry looks OK, try changing it back and then:
Quite often the /dev/fd0 is only a (sym)link to /dev/fd0x1440 or something. Using a konsole (or xterm, or whatever), look and see what the listing for /dev/fd0 is:
$ls -l /dev/fd0

If the link is broken, or doesn't exist, then this would cause 'fd0 is not a valid block device' error.

re:
 

I'll be giving that command a go here in about a half hour or so and i'll see what i get back from it... As far as the floppy being corrupt I tried to mount my boot disk I created and I know it works because i've used it to boot up with.. Also my cousin is having the same problem, we installed linux together and are still doing our initial setup/changes as well as looking for a way to resolve this issue.

re:
 

I tryed the command ls -l /dev/fd0 and got the following back (lr-xr-xr-x 1 root root
8 Apr 9 22:42 /dev/fd0 -> floppy/0) dont know if this will help any but i figured id show you...i dont know exacly what it means but im sure you or someone else does.....i take it that /dev/fd0 points to floppy/0 but i dont know if thats what the line should read or where to change it if its not right...

Hope someone can help me here, im pretty sure I found the problem but who knows. Anyways I went to console and typed dmesg to and found the following lines. (Floppy drive(s): floppy fd0 is 1.44m) (floppy0:floppy io-port 0x03f0 in use)

Can anyone tell me how to change the io port if this is possible or just tell me how to fix it...thanks!

re:
 

If anyone cares I figured It out myself. Did "dmesg" after boot so I could read everything that flashes across the screen at boot. I found that it states the io-port for fd0 is in use. So I went into lilo and I appened "nobiospnp" to the spot where you can have stuff passed to the kernal at boot, and then I had lilo rewrite itself to the hard drive and what do you know, my floppy works....

P.S. I hope this will help someone else out....

It's good to see someone posting their triumphs rather than 'Don't worry, sorted it myself'. Thank you MikeH.