Difficulty Mounting USB Floppy Drive
 

I am having some serious issues mounting my USB floppy drive. If I try to mount it on /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy then I get a message saying that /dev/fd0 is not a proper block or something like that.

Depending on how I type the mount command I sometimes also get an error message saying that the file system is wrong 'ntfs'. This happens when I try to mount on /dev/sdax where x is any number. I have formatted the floppy disk on my Windows OS as FAT, so I don't know what is going wrong there.

Any help would be appreciated. If you need more information, just tell me what you need and I'll get it for you.

Thanks in advance,

Jason

Try something like;

tail /var/log/messages

mkdir /mnt/usbfloppy

mount -t auto /dev/sdX /mnt/usbfloppy -o rw

Where the usb floppy device is taken from the output of the first command, if this is the first SCSI/usb device then it will be sda, if not then it will be the first available SCSI device.

FYI: floppy drives and media have no partitions.

Alright, so when I type the command: tail /var/log/messages nothing happens. If I type /var/log/messages | tail then I am told that access is denied.

I am running Windows XP on my computer. I have an external USB hard drive on which I have installed Red Hat Fedora FC6 i386. I am obviously trying to set up a dual boot system. Last year was the first time I had ever done ANYTHING with a Linux distribution. So when I installed it I installed the GRUB boot loader on my MBR. The result of this was that the only way I could boot into anything at all (Linux or Windows) was to have the external hard drive on. This was not what I wanted because I did not plan on taking my external hard drive everywhere I went all the time.

So, I figured out how to restore my MBR back to its original state. I installed the GRUB boot loader on the first sector of the partition on which I wished to install Linux. I also figured out that if I use the Linux installation CD to boot into rescue mode I can do the following:

chroot /mnt/sysimage
dd if=/dev/hda3 of=boot.lnx bs=512 count=1
mcopy boot.lnx a:

Then I would boot back into Windows and copy boot.lnx to my root directory.
After this all I had to do was edit my boot.ini file.

Now...last year when I did all of this I was able to bypass the whole floppy drive. I created the boot.lnx file while GRUB was still installed on my MBR and then booted into Linux and emailed myself the file. However, this time I do not want to have to "fix" my MBR. I simply want to mount my USB floppy and use it to copy boot.lnx to my root directory.

Sorry, I forgot to include a question in my previous reply. Basically the tail /var/log/messages did not do anything. Is there something else I need to know about that command? Is there another way I can try to mount it? When I boot to Windows the USB floppy drive shows up as "TEAC FD-05PUW".

Any help would be appreciated

Your floppy drive should be recognized as a /dev/sdx device. USB, SATA, Firewire and SATA all use SCSI subsystem and have a /dev/sdx device ID. If you have more then one such device it could be /dev/sdb or /dev/sdc. Look at the output of the dmesg command.
dmesg | grep TEAC
or
dmesg | grep sdb

Remember, linux is case sensitive.

Also the 'tail /var/log/messages' command must be run as root or equivalent.

Okay. That makes sense. So, let's say I use the installation cd to boot into rescue mode. Am I automatically logged in as root or no? If not, how do I log in as root?

You are in single user mode which pretty much means that you have unlimited unrestricted access (just like being root). In most cases using the installation media (rescue mode) is similar to single user mode or root access. If you are not sure how to log on as root, then use the user name root and the password you first entered as requested.