Hey guys, I'm struggling a bit to mount some floppies that are created by our Pick And Place machine.
It's network card had been removed before we purchased it, and its Pentium 1 processor didn't come with USB, so I'm stuck using the floppy disk.
I don't know Redhat, and I don't know if the floppy disk is even working. Can you guys maybe give me any idea of how to firstly check that the FDD is working, and secondly if it is working and I just can't read it from a different PC, wwhat I'm doing wrong.

The errors I get when trying to read from Ubuntu:
or when I try to use the GUI it says:
It looks like the hard drive is in the process of failing, and I would like to make sure that the weekly backups I'm so diligently creating are actually readable

Any and all help is appreciated!

What version of Red Hat are you running?

A floppy disk drive connected to a real floppy disk controller would have a device ID /dev/fd0.

The output of the following command would show if the drive is recognized and the floppy drive module is loaded.

ls -l /dev/fd0

What type of floppy drive is installed on the different PC? hardware floppy controller or USB drive? What version of Ubuntu is runnint? I don't think that Ubuntu installs the floppy drive module by default anymore. If it is a real floppy drive controller is the drive recognized and do you have a /dev/fd0 device. Otherwise, if it is a USB drive then it would look like a typical USB drive with a /dev/sdx ID.

hmm well the floppy drive needs a disk in it and it should not be a sdX but a fdX
see
https://home.ubalt.edu/abento/linux/terminal/mount.html

does your kernel have the floppy.ko module? Check using root powers

I'm not quite sure how to check what version of Red Hat is running. How do I check?

EDIT: Red Har V6.2 (Zoot)

Yes, thats right, it's a USB Floppy Disk Drive that is plugged into a machine that I have Ubuntu 22.04 runing from a live USB

On the Pick and Place machine I haven't really messed around in the CLI, it's usually busy building PCBs.
And most of the commands I know don't work on it.
It's an old and customized version of Red Hat

As stated above, the FDD I have is a USB one, which is why it shows up as sdX instead of fdX

Could that be the reason I'm having trouble?



Also, it's(The Pick And Place machine) definitely trying something. It formats the disks, and writes data to them. The floppy makes the "normal" floppy sounds.(Well... I can't say that as I got into computers after floppies was phased out)

I don't think we have a PC in the office that has a native floppy installed.

I ran this:

So it's running Red Hat 6.2

If the Pentium PC fails is there is a backup plan in place? Do you have spare hardware etc?
Is creating backups to floppy an automated process?

You need to make sure the write process is complete and the disk is unmounted before you can eject the disk. After you insert the disk into the Ubuntu PC run this from a terminal.

sudo file -s /dev/sdx (Replace with the actual floppy drive device ID)

The backup plan is buy a replacement. The spares are available but very expensive.
https://www.pfipartsus.com/products/...5-for-linescan
It's not automated, but after hounding my boss for a few months to buy an Ethernet card, he determined it was too expensive, so floppy is what we have.

The machine tells you to remove the disk, so I assume it does that in the background.
I'll try that now, thanks!

I ran
sudo file -s /dev/sdd
Got:
/dev/sdd: ERROR: cannot read '/dev/sdd' (Input/output error)

Looks like it.

A USB drive does not use the floppy module.

Difficult to say if the USB or the hardware floppy drive is not working, what filesystem it might contain or if the disk is broken. Insert a floppy in the USB drive does not contain any important data and try to format it like:

sudo mke2fs -t ext2 /dev/sdd

Make sure that /dev/sdd is really your USB floppy disk drive...

So I think the floppy is corrupt or the drive is not working.

I tried mounting the floppy on the machine itself, and it said

Major, minor device numbers for the floppy are 2,0 i.e. ls -l /dev/fd0
The exact date (Mon YY XX:XX) does not matter. /dev directory in RH 9 would be part of the root filesystem versus Ubuntu as a temporary filesystem.

When I ran ls -l /dev/fd0
It returned
brw-rw-rw- 1 root root 2, 0 May 5 1998 /dev/fd0

How are you trying to mount the disc?