mounting usb floppy
 

in order to mount my usb floppy drive,
I added the following line to my /etc/fstab:

/dev/sda /mnt/floppy auto noauto,user 0 0

when i tried to mount my floppy using "mount /dev/sda",
everything worked fine, but when I tried "mount /mnt/floppy",
the computer hung until I killed the process, at which point it
returned an error message regarding /dev/fd0 (I don't have an
internal floppy drive, by the way).

Now, when I changed the entry in fstab to

/dev/sda /mnt/usbfd auto noauto,user 0 0

I had no problem with "mount" whether specifying /dev/sda or
/mnt/usbfd



What's the reason for this? Why does it care whether
I mount it on /mnt/floppy or /mnt/usbfd?

On a related note, what is the /mnt/hd? It was created
by default.

Thanks.

It doesn't... my educated guess would be
that you didn't unmount the device before
mounting the mount-point :)


Cheers,
Tink

This may sound like a dumb question...
 

... but did you make sure that there's not another /mnt/floppy entry in the fstab that points to /dev/fd0? Sounds like it tried to mount the nonexistent /dev/fd0 over top of the already mounted /dev/sda.

Thank you very much, Tinkster and CoryS.
It turned out there was another entry for /mnt/floppy
that I missed.

ok, so now i can mount my floppy with "mount /mnt/floppy" and
with "mount /dev/sda".
the problem is that when i try to modify an existing file on the floppy
and try to save the modified file, i get a message saying "file exists" (even though i'm root) and it won't let me save. however i can create new files on the floppy without problem.

how can i fix that?

thank you.

Which tool/editor are you using to modify
the files? What happens if you let's say
create a file on the floppy using touch,
and then echo into it?

touch /mnt/floppy/test
echo "Just testing" > /mnt/floppy/test
echo "Still testing" >> /mnt/floppy/test

What are the permissions on the files?



Cheers,
TInk

Hello again, Tinkster. Thank you for your help.
I use vi to modify the files. I still can't do it. I can
only create. But the opposite is true when I echo
into it. Here's my script file:

root@hp:/mnt# ls -l|grep floppy
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Dec 14 22:24 floppy
root@hp:/mnt# mount /mnt/floppy
root@hp:/mnt# ls -l|grep floppy
drwxr--r-- 2 root root 7168 Dec 31 1969 floppy
root@hp:/mnt# cd floppy
root@hp:/mnt/floppy# ls -l
total 0
root@hp:/mnt/floppy# touch test
touch: setting times of `test': No such file or directory
root@hp:/mnt/floppy# ls -l
total 0
-rwxr--r-- 1 root root 0 Dec 15 20:00 test
root@hp:/mnt/floppy# echo "testing" >test
bash: test: No such file or directory
root@hp:/mnt/floppy# ls -l
total 0
-rwxr--r-- 1 root root 0 Dec 15 20:00 test
root@hp:/mnt/floppy# echo "testing" >>test
root@hp:/mnt/floppy# ls -l
total 1
-rwxr--r-- 1 root root 8 Dec 15 20:00 test
root@hp:/mnt/floppy# echo "the end" >test
bash: test: No such file or directory
root@hp:/mnt/floppy# ls -l
total 1
-rwxr--r-- 1 root root 8 Dec 15 20:00 test
root@hp:/mnt/floppy#
Script done on Mon Dec 15 20:01:33 2003

When you are in the VI did you press the I key to edit the text that you have?

yes, i entered new text, but when i tried to
save the file again, it said something like
"file exists". it didn't help when i used w! to
write the file.
check out that funny timestamp on the /mnt/floppy
directory after i mounted it.

Problem Solved!

It turned out that since I let the system autodetect the filesystem
type, it mount the floppy as umsdos instead of vfat. I'll have to
adjust my fstab or create an /etc/filesystems as described in the
mount man page.

Thank you for all the contributions.