The floppy drive in my SusE 8.2 machine does not appear to be usable.
I believe the hardware is okay for two reasons:
- SuSE was recently installed with the floppy drive (the CDROM is not bootable)
- floppy drive is accessed (light comes on!) during boot
(BIOS looks at A drive then C)
Once SusE is booted (either normally or with Safe Settings) no action,
e.g. mount or fdformat, will cause the floppy drive light to come on -
basically it looks like Linux can't "see" the drive.

The device names which I've tried to access appear to be listed (as expected?):

# ls -l /dev/fd0 /dev/fd0u1440
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 2, 0 Mar 4 2005 /dev/fd0
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 2, 28 Mar 4 2005 /dev/fd0u1440

When the machine boots dmesg does include the line:
Floppy drive(s): fd0 is 1.44M

Scanning the floppy with hwinfo gives:

# hwinfo --floppy
02: Floppy 00.0: 10603 Floppy Disk
[Created at floppy.119]
Unique ID: sPPV.oZ89vuho4Y3
Hardware Class: floppy
Model: "Floppy Disk"
Device File: /dev/fd0
Size: 3.5 ''
Size: 2880 sectors a 512 bytes
Drive status: no medium
Config Status: cfg=yes, avail=yes, need=no
Attached to: #1 (Floppy disk controller)

Running the hardware scan does not cause the floppy drive light to come on either!
After the hwinfo scan, messages like the one below (6 off) appear at the end of the dmesg output:

floppy driver state
-------------------
now=60456 last interrupt=77 diff=60379 last called handler=c01d5c40
timeout_message=redo fd request
last output bytes:
0 0 0
0 0 0
0 0 0
0 0 0
0 0 0
0 0 0
0 0 0
0 0 0
0 0 0
0 0 0
0 0 0
8 80 77
8 80 77
8 80 77
8 80 77
e 80 77
8 80 77
8 80 77
8 80 77
8 80 77
last result at 77
last redo_fd_request at 60156

status=ff
fdc_busy=1
DEVICE_INTR=c01d5c40
cont=c02e4c30
CURRENT=c11ecc60
command_status=-1

floppy0: floppy timeout called
end_request: I/O error, dev 02:00 (floppy), sector 0

Has anyone ever seen anything like this before? I've googled this
for some time and whilst I've found some of the error messages I've
not found a resolution.

Any help greatly appreciated.