how to enable my 3.5" floppy drive in my Linux Mint pc
 

I am greener than a newbie. May someone give me a line by line procedure to make this internal drive function, please? The drive is installed and is properly powered and cable connected to the mother board. Or point me to a tutorial where I can learn the procedure.
Thanks,
Ted.

Should find something here. I don't use floppy or Mint.

Link

[QUOTE=rokytnji;5630019]Should find something here. I don't use floppy or Mint.

Thanks.

Should be as simple as "modprobe floppy" which will give you a device to use - /dev/fd0.
Depending on what you plan to do you may require package(s) to give you the tools you need - maybe mtools, maybe dosfstools (I also don't use Mint much).

Hi Ted, welcome to the forum :)

First, what is the version of Linux Mint you're using and what is the brand and model (and model number) of your computer? Are you sure your drive is enabled in your computer's BIOS? If so, I'm not sure if it will work (because the tutorial is around six years old) but I did find this thread. Although written for an older version of Ubuntu, there is some additional information here, which may be helpful. You will need to use the terminal (or CLI) to perform the suggestions offered. Please see here for directions on how to bring up a terminal.

If you need additional help, please let us know. Please post relevant information such as error messages, logs and detailed information on what you did. :)

If you feel these suggestions are too difficult (having been new to Linux myself at one time,) perhaps the folks at a local Linux user's group (LUG) might be willing to lend a hand or you can take your computer to a local computer repair shop or technician who is knowledgeable with Linux. :)

Regards...

How to enable a 3.5" floppy drive....
 

[QUOTE=ardvark71;5630042]Hi Ted, welcome to the forum :)

Thanks ardvark. I will work on this and report back what I have found.
Ted.

Cool how to enable my 3.5" floppy drive in my Linux Mint pc
 

[QUOTE=syg00;5630023] Thanks syg00. Ted.

Cool how to enable my 3.5" floppy drive in my Linux Mint pc
 

[QUOTE=rokytnji;5630019]Should find something here. I don't use floppy or Mint.

Thanks rokytnji. Ted.

The floppy cable must be connected with the reddish looking wire to pin 1 on the drive. If it's connected properly, the green LED will light on boot.

Cool how to enable my 3.5" floppy drive in my Linux Mint pc
 

Got that part right, thanks! I sure do appreciate everyone's responses.
Ted.

Your floppy drive should be here:

If it's not there, enter the following and check again:

If you're not using a desktop environment that automounts the floppy drive disk's filesystem, then you might have to do it manually. With a disk in the drive:

That should give you the contents of the floppy disk at /mnt/floppy.

After you're done, you'd have to unmount the drive floppy disk's filesystem before physically removing the disk from the drive:

how to enable my 3.5" floppy drive in my Linux Mint pc
 

I'll try these steps again and report back. I'm wondering why the drive has to be unmounted after use. Seems to me once mounted, leave it for next time. Just asking. Remember, I said I'm greener than a newbie!
Thanks,
Ted.

Improper unmounting can cause things to break software wise. Like a power failure or improper shutdown.

Hence good practise to unmount before shutting down the desktop.
It is not going to save the mount after a power down anyways.

Thoughts.

Never hurts to look at bios settings.

Watch light sequences on power on.

Some distro's may have removed some support.

Which is one reason I keep a Puppy 4.31 and a Puppy 4.12 cd on the shelf.
Puppy throws a floppy icon on JWM on a live session run. Just click and go for floppy.