Can anyone tell me why - on my SuSe 10.1 ( newly installed ) I have to mount & umount my floppy drive each time, to be able to use it, whereas my CD / DVD drives mount & unmount automaticaly when media is inserted. There is facility in properties of CD / DVD drives to enable auto - mount / dismount, but I can't find a similar facility for the FDD. I have posted this query in Newbie, which I am, but have not got an explanation.

Most floppies do not have the ability to detect when media is present (although some do). Just about every CD/DVD drive does, though. Therefore there is no signal sent to the kernel/udev/HAL to let them "know" when you insert a floppy into the drive. The way windows gets around it is to try to mount the device any time you try to access it (and it's not already mounted) and returns an error if it can't. I'm not sure whether Gnome/KDE have the ability to do this. There is a utility called automount though that will do that. It should be available through your package management system.

Flatstan,

It is not possible to do what you're trying to do.

Windows doesn't do it either. As far as I know, normal PC hardware simply does not behave this way.

However, there are a set of utilities designed to make floppy handling easier under Linux. The package is called "MTools".

There is also a GUI available, called "MToolsFM" if you want do use the GUI instead of the command line.

MTools will enable you to access floppy disks without the need to mount them.

Have fun.

No automount will mount a device when you access its mount point. With floppies, it will just try blindly though - not knowing whether there is a floppy in the drive or not.