how come i cannot mount a floppy properly in mandrake 8.1? i mount it, but about half the time, it sits and spins, and after about 45 seconds of spinning, my computer locks completely. i restart, and i get countless harddrive errors, usually including loss of data (small things mainly...my aim buddy list, program config files, etc...) is there a fix for this in 2.4.18, or is this a unique problem with my frankenstein computer? thx again.

icy

Presumably it works OK under Windows? (or have you banished Win to the Bin?)

I've never had this problem myself, but it could be your fstab. Also, is the disk completely clean (no bad sectors, etc)?

So, what does the floppy line in your /etc/fstab look like?

it looks just like that, my friend. hot and fresh from emacs.

/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto user,iocharset=iso8859-1,umask=0,sync,exec,codepage=850,noauto 0 0

it works in windows...and that usually is the problem. i can mount it in linux, copy something to it (only in command line, nautilus is stupid and doesnt copy it), and then take it to an M$ machine with a printer. it prints no problem, but if i make a change, save it onto the disk, bring it back, and try to remount it, it locks up. do you think its writing micro$oft-infected sectors to my disk and causing it to fry? ::sarcasm::

iid banish it forever, but im not a guru yet, i dont have a printer, and i need partition magic (sorry...).

Are you unmounting the floppy before you take it out of the machine? Have you tried using mdir, mcd, mcopy, mformat, etc instead of having to mount it?

yes i do unmount the floppy, but i have not tried those. i have tried to use drakformat, and kformat from within x, but they crash by saying there is no disk in the drive. how your on to something...thanks again.