No floppy drive
 

I am running FC3 on a Dell laptop. The laptop has an interchangeable CD and floppy drive. When I loaded FC3 the CD drive was in place. When I replace it with the floppy drive FC3 does not recognise it.

There is no /dev/fd0 in place. Does this mean that there shoud be a module loaded at boot to set this up? Also fstab has no reference to /dev/fd0 or /mnt/floppy. Again, should this occur at boot time?

FC3 is different from what I was used to in past RH distros where I could edit fstab and add devices with mknod. Now I am reluctant to mess around with /dev and fstab or mtab when I don't know what I am doing. Some advice would be appreciated.

Have you got floppy disk support enabled in the kernel?

Have you got a floppy disk entry in the udev rules (check /etc/udev/)?

Does any mention of the floppy drive show up when you run dmesg?

I am using the kernel that came with the distro. I have not recompiled it so by default it should include the floppy, shouldn't it?

This is the reference in the udev rules:

KERNEL="fd[0-9]*", SYMLINK="floppy%e"
KERNEL="nst[0-9]*", SYMLINK="tape%e"

KERNEL="hd[a-z]", PROGRAM="/bin/cat /proc/ide/%k/media", RESULT="cdrom", SYMLINK="cdrom%e"

KERNEL="hd[a-z]", PROGRAM="/bin/cat /proc/ide/%k/media", RESULT="floppy", SYMLINK="floppy%e

dmesg has these references to floppy:

ide-floppy driver 0.99.newide
floppy0: no floppy controllers found.


Does this mean that the kernel does not include floppy drive support?