Cant read my floppy
 

Hi

When I try and mount my floppy drive I get the following error

mount: /dev/fd0: unknown device

my fstab looks like this:

/dev/hda6 / ext2 defaults 1 1
none /dev/pts devpts mode=0620 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
/dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom auto user,iocharset=iso8859-1,umask=0,exec,codepage=850,ro,noauto 0 0
/dev/scd0 /mnt/cdrom2 auto user,iocharset=iso8859-1,umask=0,exec,codepage=850,ro,noauto 0 0
/dev/hda1 /mnt/win_c vfat iocharset=iso8859-1,umask=0,codepage=850 0 0
/dev/hda5 /mnt/win_d vfat iocharset=iso8859-1,umask=0,codepage=850 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hda7 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto user,iocharset=iso8859-1,umask=0,sync,exec,codepage=850,noauto 0 0

I am using Mandrake 8.1 - kernel 2.4

Thanks in advance

firstly, can you read the device directly?
ie cat /dev/fd0 > /dev/null
if it complains of unknown device, you probably don't have floppy drive support in your kernel or lack the kernel modules.

This is what I got

cat: /dev/fd0: No such device or address

Does not look good

Type cat /proc/devices. Do you see something like:
in the output?

What kernel version and distro are you using?

This is my output:

1 mem
2 pty/m%d
3 pty/s%d
4 tts/%d
5 cua/%d
6 lp
7 vcs
10 misc
13 input
14 sound
29 fb
108 ppp
128 ptm
136 pts/%d
162 raw
180 usb

Block devices:
1 ramdisk
3 ide0
9 md
22 ide1


Using Mandrake 8.1 - Kernel 2.4

Regards

Nope. no floppy. Try trawling thru your /lib/modules/`uname -r`/ directory for something like fd.o or floppy.o and modprobe that and see if the above tests work.

Does the drive still work via windows?

Does linux recognize the drive:
dmesg | grep fd0

when I dmesg I get the following:

Floppy drive(s): fd0 is 1.44M

I ran /lib/modules/`uname -r`/

and this is my output

drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Oct 19 15:20 alsa/
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 20 Oct 19 15:20 build -> /usr/src/linux-2.4.8 (Flashing RED)
drwxr-xr-x 7 root root 4096 Oct 19 15:20 kernel/
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 125969 Oct 20 07:26 modules.dep
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 31 Oct 20 07:26 modules.generic_string
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 7746 Oct 20 07:26 modules.isapnpmap
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 29 Oct 20 07:26 modules.parportmap
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 44297 Oct 20 07:26 modules.pcimap
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 71817 Oct 20 07:26 modules.usbmap
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Oct 19 15:20 pcmcia/

BTW what does `uname -r`/ do?

Regards

you need to search the whole tree:

find /lib/modules/`uname -r` -name '*fd*.o'

It returned nothing :(