Hi everybody!

It seems that I lost my access to my floppy. My dvd-rom and my cd writer drives seem to mount okay but my drive floppy not, and even the media applet does not want to show the floppy icon that used have. My question: Is there any command to tell suse 10.1 to reconstruct my fstab and redetect my floppy, so I can mount/unmount normaly with the help of the media applet. I'm a novice with linux but I got a little knowledge
(novice-*-----intermediate) so take it slow please.

Here is my fstab file:

/dev/hda2 / reiserfs acl,user_xattr 1 1
/dev/hda3 /home reiserfs acl,user_xattr 1 2
/dev/hda1 swap swap defaults 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs noauto 0 0
debugfs /sys/kernel/debug debugfs noauto 0 0
usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs noauto 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts mode=0620,gid=5 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy auto noauto,user,sync 0 0

Thanks in advance.

The short answer is no. Several things have to be correct for the floppy to work.

First of all, the hardware has to work. When you boot your machine, do you see the light on the floppy come on at all? If yes, chances are, the hardware is O.K. Does it work in another OS, ie windoze or even a DOS boot diskette? Is it disabled in BIOS?

If the hardware is OK, the next thing is to go to your /dev directory. Is there a fd0 file there? There may not be if the hardware is not working. If that is there, then lets look at the entry in fstab.

The first entry has to match what you find in /dev for the first floppy, usually fd0. So if it matches, next check the mount point, /media/floppy. In aa konsole, make sure that directory is there, and check the permissions. Do a 'cd /mnt/floppy' without the quotes. Then do a 'ls -dl /mnt/floppy' this will display the owner, and permissions on that directory.

Here is what I see on my working floppy.

Root should own it. The other options you have look O.K. to me.

Post back what you find.

Hi! Camorri

I got openSUSE 10.2 up and runing and I did all the updates plus the new KDE 3.5.8 for it. My floppy (my floppy is an ide internal drive) media applet in the taskbar is not shown anymore. I do know that it works out with KDE 3.5.5 If I do a "mount /dev/fd0 /mnt" as a root then it reads the floppy but the the media applet icon in the task bar still do not show. If I do a ls -dl /mnt/floppy I get:

ls: cannot access /mnt/floppy: No such file or directory

If I do ls -dl /mnt I get:

drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 7168 1969-12-31 16:00 /mnt

Now, know there is an adminitrative tools for users (system-> configuration-> Kuser(User Manager) in suse 10.2 and I have check floppy for my non-root account but the floppy media applet icon still do not show. I found a posting form jschiwal in the Suse/Novell forrum and it said:

Do you have a /dev/fd0 device?

Look at the output of "lsmod | grep floppy". If you don't see a module, try to modprobe either the floppy module or the ide_floppy module, depending on the type of floppy drive you have.

I did "lsmod | grep floppy" as a root and it gave me a blank prompt.. I do not know how to do the reloading of the module for my floppy Can you please walk me thru it?

Thanks in advance.

When that happened to me, I did the following:

/sbin/modprobe/floppy

If this is the case, you have to have the necessary modules loaded, or support in your kernel. I think you can stop worrying about using modprobe. Note the mount point is /mnt not /mnt/floppy. The error you got is there because you have not created a directory /mnt/floppy. ( no need to do so, unless that is where you want to mount the floppy.

The above command is mounting the floppy device at directory location /mnt. That is fine.

The icon on the task bar can probably be added. Try a right click on an open space on the task bar, and look for an option to Add Applet. I just added one, clicked it, and Konqueror fired up, and showed the contents of my floppy.

Thanks for the reply camorri. yes it reads mechanicaly the floppy, but I still can not see my floppy media applet wich I know, I can thru the sub menu of the task bar and to the add applet to panel menu, so I can mount/unmount or lounck file manager konqueror to view the files in the floppy, it just refuses to show the floppy icon every time I upgrade KDE to a new version from yast/smart package manager repositories this happens. And yes I have a /dev/fd0 file and a /media/floppy folder in the root directory. Any ideas?

Thanks in advance.

I don't run Suse, so outside of what I have suggested, I don't know. Sorry. Possibly someone with Suse experience will respond.