Well, I had to get a USB floppy drive. I have lots of stuff on floppies, plus at univ. there are many computers with floppy drives.

I've got a Sony MPF series. Harddrake says it's there, but it's listed as "unknown", and so I can't access it.

Someone on another board posted the following:

$su
#mkdir /mnt/USB
#mount -t vfat /dev/sda1(orwhateveritis) /mnt/USB

I'm not sure what sda1 means, but I tried that and I've got a USB folder in /mnt, but there's nothing in it, and still not recognizing my drive. I've got a floppy in it already. It does get power, sine everytime I plug it n to a new USB port, the drive light comes on. But no filesystem access. I've got several USB ports. I tried each one, but to no avail.

I'd appreciate some ideas, if possible.

When you tried the command were there any error messages?
Look at the ouput of dmesg for messages relating to the USB drive.

sd means SCSI disk and 1 is the 1st partition.

Here's what I typed, including the message I got. The result of all of this was a folder named "USB" in my /mnt folder. Can't really do anything with it.

What I typed:

[cs@localhost cs]$ su
[root@localhost cs]# #mkdir /mnt/usb
[root@localhost cs]# mount -t vfat /dev/sda1/mnt/usb

What I got:

Usage: mount -V : print version
mount -h : print this help
mount : list mounted filesystems
mount -l : idem, including volume labels
So far the informational part. Next the mounting.
The command is `mount [-t fstype] something somewhere'.
Details found in /etc/fstab may be omitted.
mount -a [-t|-O] ... : mount all stuff from /etc/fstab
mount device : mount device at the known place
mount directory : mount known device here
mount -t type dev dir : ordinary mount command
Note that one does not really mount a device, one mounts
a filesystem (of the given type) found on the device.
One can also mount an already visible directory tree elsewhere:
mount --bind olddir newdir
or move a subtree:
mount --move olddir newdir
A device can be given by name, say /dev/hda1 or /dev/cdrom,
or by label, using -L label or by uuid, using -U uuid .
Other options: [-nfFrsvw] [-o options] [-p passwdfd].
For many more details, say man 8 mount .

I also found this . . .not sure what to amke of it:

Mandrake 10 makes use of the supermount kernel module. After switching
to the root user and profile you should be able to `lsmod` and see the
supermount module listed. In the mdk 10 implementation you should be
able to plug the floppy into a working usb connection, insert a floppy
into the drive and do `supermount enable`. If everything is functioning
correctly then fstab will contain an odd entry for the floppy drive.
When the device becomes active supermount will automagically mount the
file system.