i am trying to mount my usb floppy on my laptop. I have just installed mandrake 8.1 and know squat about linux. Any help would be appreciated

did you load usb modules?
(i assume the usb device are compiled as modules)

use modprobe to load usbmodules

what exactly do I do though? I did the modprobe thing and it said nothing to load. Sorry but I know squat about linux

They may have been loaded during startup, mandrake is pretty good about things like that. So (assuming you configured it in the setup of Mandrake) you would run:
mount /dev/usb/fd0 /mnt/floppy

Try this and hopefully that will work. If the usb modules aren't loaded, you would run:
modprobe usb (usb-uhci;usb-ohci;usb-core if usb doesn't work alone)

Give em a try, see if any of those work.

Oh and to test it (and to enter the floppy if it works) you would do this:
cd /mnt/floppy

Then to see what's on the floppy type:
ls

Good luck

heres what I got when i did mount /dev/usb/fd0 /mnt/floppy

mount: special drive /dev/usb/fd0 does not exist

any other ideas guys?

Did you do a successful modprobe yet?

Then at a prompt just type 'mount'

Oh and list the results of the mount

the uhci modprobe was successful. After I try to mount it, it says

mount: special device /dev/usb/fd0 doesnt not exist

I've just seeing your post because I had the same problem, so I do continued searching the internet because the solutions that people gave you did not work with me too (I am using Red Hat 9, but it does not matters).

If you want to access your floppy drive, first you should mount it this way:

mount /dev/sda /mnt/floppy

...and, after you have mounted it, you have to access to the folder where you have mounted it, this case you have to access to /mnt/floppy.

NOTE 1: To mount your device in that folder, you have to be root. You can login as root in a console this way:

su
password: [enter your password]

... I mean, you write 'su' in your console and the login program will ask you for your root password. You insert it and you have just logged in as root. Then, you can mount your floppy.

NOTE 2: You also have to create your mount point, I mean, the folder where you want to mount your floppy drive by usb (in the example I gave you the folder is '/mnt/floppy', a very common one).

Goodbye and luck...

Using Mandrake 10, when I issue this command, it responds with this message:


What should be done now?

And what about some sort of automatic support for USB floppy, just like we have it in Macintosh.

I use Suse 9.0 so I dont know if this is the same with other distros.

In KDE when I plug in a usb device, if I wait a few seconds the desktop comes alive and shows an icon for the usb device whether its a thumb drive in which case its sda1 (2,3,4, whatever) or a zip disk in which case its zip. It seems strange but try waiting a bit to see if the file system kicks in.

Otherwise make sure that you create a mount point in /mnt or /media depending on your distro, call it usbfloppy or whateber you like. You may have to be root to do it.

Then as root mount /dev/sda -t msdos (or whatever is the file system type) /mnt/usbfloppy ( or /media/usbfloppy if your a happy suse user)

If your unsure about the file system try the man pages for a hint.

Good Luck

floppies suck