floppy disks really give me a lot of problems in linux, specifically RH9. today i was trying to copy a network card module from one laptop to another, both running RH9, and both with the same kernel. one laptop had a built in floppy, the other had a USB floppy. i formatted the floppy on the built in, put the file on, took it to the USB drive, and it found nothing. i then 'touched' a file on the disk, took it back to the built in, nothing. then i went to another laptop with a built in floppy, put the disk in, and it detected the touched files. so i put the network module on the disk from that laptop, which was also RH9, and it read it fine on the USB drive. long story short, shouldn't i be able to write to a disk and move it to any other disk drive and read it? i tried the following things:

mkfs -t ext2 ... and then explicitly mounting ext2 on the other
plain mkfs (which said it defaulted to ext2 anyway)

any help? any good floppy FAQs out there? any help is appreciated

"i formatted the floppy on the built in, put the file on, took it to the USB drive, and it found nothing."

There are two different answers depending on whether you are using automount or not.

If you are not using automount then you need to mount a filesystem before you use it and umount a file system before you remove the floppy from the drive:
mkfs /dev/fd0
mount /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy
cp /home/user/file.in.question /mnt/floppy
umount /dev/fd0

If you are using automount then you and automount are in disagreement on the mount status of the floppy. I consider automount to be more of a problem than a help. You can get rid of automount in the /etc/fstab line for the floppy.


___________________________________
Be prepared. Create a LifeBoat CD.
http://users.rcn.com/srstites/LifeBo...home.page.html

Steve Stites

Are you unounting them before taking them
out?

Cheers,
Tink

hey guys,

thanks for your help. i'll go try that. hopefully this is one more mystery solved

skiz

I'm having a similar issue. I would like my floppy to be ready to use. Even when I do this... I get an error.
# mount /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/fd0,
or too many mounted file systems

Hi Silly, :)

You really shouldn't attach your problem
to somebody elses thread ...

That said, what does your fstab look like?

And, mount accepts several syntax', but
the one you chose isn't valid.

If there's a entry in /etc/fstab, you can use
either
mount /dev/<physical device>
or
mount /<mountpoint>

If you specify both you're supposed to tell
it the filesystem type, too, as in
mount -t msdos /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy

Read
man mount
man fstab
for more info.


Cheers,
Tink

I see no problem that I added my problem to theirs. We both have similar problems.

LABEL=/ / ext3 defaults 1 1
LABEL=/boot /boot ext3 defaults 1 2
none /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner,kudzu 0 0
/dev/scd0 /mnt/cdrom iso9660 noauto,user,ro, 0 0
dev/hda3 swap swap defaults 0 0