LinuxQuestions.org - Mounting a USB Floppy drive?

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Mounting a USB Floppy drive?

I have the NEC UF0002 external floppy drive. I plugged it into my usb port and the drive activated (light came on for a couple of seconds). I don't know how to mount it so I can access the data.

I'm working with Wine to try to run some old DOS/Windows educational games for my kids. I believe the disks are formatted FAT12 (DOS).

You will first need to find out what the device name is...
[code]dmesg | tail[/tail]

See what shows up there when you plug the drive in - for example, my USB hard drives pop up at sda / sdb

Then, using the mount command:

Code:

mount -t fat /dev/<device> /mnt/floppy

Replace <device> with whatever dmesg gives you, and you may need to create /mnt/floppy if it doesn't already exist

problems mounting a usb floppy drive

I'm having troubles mounting/reading/formatting my usb floppy drive.
lsusb tells me:

Code:

Bus 001 Device 007: ID 03ee:6901 Mitsumi SmartDisk FDD

dmesg |tail
originally told me:

Code:

[17182848.096000] usb 1-2: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 3

[17182848.220000] usb 1-2: device descriptor read/64, error -71

[17182849.220000] usb 1-2: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 5

[17182849.628000] usb 1-2: device not accepting address 5, error -71

If I try

Code:

 mount -t vfat /dev/sde /mnt/floppy

 mount -t msdos /dev/sde /mnt/floppy

it tells me "can't read superblock"
and after trying to mount as msdos it tells me:

Code:

[17213821.932000] sd 1:0:0:3: SCSI error: return code = 0x8000002

[17213821.932000] sdd: Current: sense key: Medium Error

[17213821.932000]    Additional sense: Cannot read medium - unknown format

[17213821.932000] end_request: I/O error, dev sdd, sector 0

[17213821.932000] FAT: unable to read boot sector

Also /dev/fd is a directory with device files so:

Code:

 mount /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy

mount: special device /dev/fd0 does not exist

How do I find / identify the floppy? what should I see / look for/ write in /etc/mtab or /etc/fstab? I just want to format the floppies. I don't care about reading them. It would be nice but not essential.
Thank you for your time.

Because it's usb it's going to get a scsi device name instead of fd0 or fd1, just like a flash drive. So, after inserting a disk, if your drive is sda and your mount point is /mnt/floppy, it would mount like this:

mount -t vfat /dev/sda /mnt/floppy

Donnied, you're getting medium error and boot sector errors. Do you have a [good] disk inserted into the floppy drive? That could explain those. When I get the "device not accepting..." errors with mine I have to move it to a different usb port. One more thing: is uhci correct for your usb controller?

Thank you for the info. It suddenly started (somewhat) working.
Yeah, most of the disks I had weren't very good. So I bought some new ones. They work better but it takes a long time to mount them.

the usb floppy is somewhat working. three questions:
1. every diskette brings up about 5 floppies in /media/ floppy-1, floppy-5.
I'm guessing this is because of the partitions. Is there any neat way to have it appear as just /media/floppy?
(does /mnt/floppy represent all the partitions on the floppy)

2. I'm trying to set up an install of tiny linux (a slackware derivative). I have bare.i. I used
'dd if=bare of=/media/floppy-1/bare.i' to write it to a floppy. So far it's only produced disks that give me a non-system disk or disk error message.
Should this produce a floppy that I can boot from to continue installation?

dmesg | tail now gives me

Code:

 unable to read partition table

[17185716.852000] ldm_parse_privhead(): Cannot find PRIVHEAD structure. LDM database is corrupt. Aborting.

I'll check on the UHCI.

All my other usb devices work fine. This is working somewhat. It does write and read files. Just not well. Could it be because it's not the greatest usb > floppy?
would it be worth investing more?

Quote:

Originally Posted by fukawi2

... dmesg | tail[/tail]

You might want to edit that "[/tail]" to "[/code]" -- the appearance is confusing.

Also, if you run this before plugging in the USB device, doesn't tail need an "-f" option?:

Code:

dmesg | tail -f

Quote:

1. every diskette brings up about 5 floppies in /media/ floppy-1, floppy-5.
I'm guessing this is because of the partitions. Is there any neat way to have it appear as just /media/floppy?

I'm not very familiar with Ubuntu, but I would think that these are created automatically with the detection of devices, regardless of how many physically exist. Unless you've partitioned the floppy disk it should be just the floppy-1.

Quote:

I used 'dd if=bare of=/media/floppy-1/bare.i' to write it to a floppy. So far it's only produced disks that give me a non-system disk or disk error message.

dd = duplicate disk - creates or restores an uncompressed image.

Code:

dd if=/dev/floppy-1 of=~/floppy_backup.img

Use the cp command instead.

Any ideas on how to fix/diagnose the appearance of multiple floppies?

I'm using dd because I'm writing a disk image to boot from. I thought I couldn't use cp for that.

Thank you for your time.

Thank you. I didn't see anything in the dmesg, but I guessed at the /dev/sda and was able to mount.

I appreciate the help.