I'm one of those newbies to the whole Linux experience, and have had FC5 on my computer for about 10 days or so.

The floppy drive has disappeared from the 'Computer' folder on my desktop. I think this probably happened when I used Pup to update things, which included udating from FC5 2.6.15 to 2.6.18.

Putting a disk in the drive gets no response. If I enter the command gfloppy, I get an error saying 'Cannot initialize device', but floppy -p tells me '/dev/fd0: 3.5" HD'. As far as I can tell, it doesn't feature in fstab at all. The drive works OK if I boot into Windows, so it's not a hardware problem.

I'm at a loss to know what to do about this; I need to be able to use the floppy, so can anyone help me find it, please.

This may be the answer to your problem


#this creates the mount directory for the floppy
mkdir /media/floppy

#this changes the permission so that users can read and write but not execute from the directory

chmod 756 /media/floppy

#this will add the path to the fstab file so that it will bring back the icon in the panel for root and all users

gedit /etc/fstab

# now add the following line

/dev/fd0 /media/floppy auto noauto,owner 0 0

That's done the job perfectly.

Thanks DCOH.

Glad to help I found that info on another website and used it myself.