No Floppy in Mandrake 8.1
 

Is it me or a hardware problem?

Here are the Floppy lines in the boot-up screen

Floppy drive(s): fd0 is 1.44M
floppy0: Floppy io-port 0x03f0 in use
ide-floppy driver 0.97

When I click on the Floppy icon on the desktop, I get an error message that says "Could not mount device. The reported error was: mount: /dev/fd0: unknown device

Another thing is I don't have a CD-ROM icon on the desktop and have to mount it as root. I couldn't get the Floppy to work even as root.

During the install, Mandrake made a boot disk and a Replay disk so I don't understand why I can't access floppies.
:study:

this might sound stupid, but did you insert a floppy then try to mount it ?? have you tried from the command line to mount it and if so what errors did you get ?? what does your fstab look like ??

Yeah, I had a floppy inserted.

I got the same error (or similar) when trying to do it from the command line. (either as root or user)

I'm in Windows right now because my modem won't work with Linux so I'll have to look at fstab later. Where do I find it? I've only had this installed for about a week, so I'm still not familiar with where stuff is.

Thanks


:study:

Here it is. I've separated the lines to make it easier to read.

/dev/hda8 / ext2 defaults 1 1

none /dev/pts devpts mode=0620 0 0

none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0

/mnt/cdrom /mnt/cdrom supermount dev=/dev/hdc,fs=auto,exec,ro,--,user,iocharset=iso8859-1,umask=0,codepage=850,noauto 0 0

/dev/scd0 /mnt/cdrom2 auto user,iocharset=iso8859-1,umask=0,exec,codepage=850,ro,noauto 0 0

/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto user,iocharset=iso8859-1,umask=0,sync,exec,codepage=850,noauto 0 0

/dev/hda1 /mnt/win_c vfat iocharset=iso8859-1,umask=0,codepage=850 0 0

/dev/hda5 /mnt/win_d vfat iocharset=iso8859-1,umask=0,codepage=850 0 0

/dev/hda6 /mnt/win_e vfat iocharset=iso8859-1,umask=0,codepage=850 0 0

/dev/hda7 /mnt/win_f vfat iocharset=iso8859-1,umask=0,codepage=850 0 0

/dev/hda10 /mnt/win_g vfat iocharset=iso8859-1,umask=0,codepage=850 0 0

none /proc proc defaults 0 0

/dev/hda9 swap swap defaults 0 0

and you did try mounting a floppy with this:

Yes. I tried it first as user and got a message that said only root
can do this, even though user has permission according to the floppy
icon's properties. So anyway, I did su root and tried it again and I
get this error message: "mount: /dev/fd0: unknown device"

I tried it using
mount -t vfat /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy
and also using
mount -t auto /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy

and you do have fd0 in your /dev directory... this is strange.. it should work with the commands you gave... according to your fstab file.

Yep, fd0 is in the /dev directory and the funny thing is, when Mandrake installed, I didn't have any problem making a boot disk and an installation replay disk. If the install program recognized the floppy, why doesn't the main OS?
:study:

Try editing the entry for your floppy in /etc/fstab so it looks like this,

Thanks, I'll give it a try and let you know. I'm assuming here that I can just edit it in a regular text editor, right?
:study:

Thats right but you'll need to be root to save the new file, open a terminal, su to root and do "mcedit /etc/fstab".

Yeah, I just found out while I was offline that I can't save it as user. Ok, so when I do mcedit /etc/fstab, where does the file open and do I need to know some special command to save it when I'm done editing? I'm still too fresh of a newbie to know what to expect here. Does it get edited right in the terminal, or does the terminal open another program (mcedit?) with fstab as the file to edit?

Speaking of which, is there some good help on terminal commands in Linux and if so, where is it located?

Thanks.
:study:

"mcedit /etc/fstab" will open fstab in the midnight commander editor in the terminal. After you edit the file you save it with <F2><Enter>. Do "mc" in the terminal to have a look at midnight commander, its a handy console based file browser/manager/editor.

OK, I did the deed but I still can't mount the floppy. I'm getting the same error message: /dev/fd0: unknown

I checked the property sheets for fd0 and 0 and here's what they say. Does this look right to you?

Properties for fd0:

Type: Block Device
Location: /dev
Size: O B (0)
Points to: floppy/0

Properties for 0:

Type: Block Device
Location: /dev/floppy
Size: O B (0)

Also, in the Control Center, in the area where the drives are, on the tab for removable drives, my cdrom and cdrw are there but there is no floppy drive. Shouldn't it be there with the other removable drives?

Thanks,
:study:

You have to pass a kernel option
 

I had the same problem. To fix it, just pass "nobiospnp" option to the kernel. If you boot with lilo, open /etc/lilo.conf, find the kernel you want to boot, and add the above option to the end of the line that says append="..., ..., ..., nobiospnp".
That should fix it. Hope it works. Later.

Re: You have to pass a kernel option
 

Yep. That did the trick. There's a note about this problem over at the Mandrake site on the Errata page.

Thanks for the input.
:study:

"Points to floppy/0"? is this a sym link? It should be the other way around, /dev/floppy should be a link to /dev/fd0
This entry should be the link
One its working it will be there.
You might want to try running the makedev script to recreate your floppy dev entries, see "man MAKEDEV" for the commands.

I was finally able to get my floppy working by adding 'nobiospnp' to the append line of /etc/lilo.conf.

At this stage of my Linux experience, I don't know how to tell the difference between a symlink and a link.
:study:

Ah yes...links, it helps if you think of hyperlinks but instead of html think of internal links on your computer. A hard link is between things in the same directory and a sym link can span directories....IIRC.

Does that mean all the icons on the desktop are sym links?

That depends, I have a hyperlink on my desktop, but all the rest are sym links :)

So how do ya tell?
:study:

Because I put them there. You can only do a sym link or a hyperlink on the desktop...well you could do a hard link but it would have to be a link to something else on the desktop, so there would be not much point in it.

Hi, i got the same problem. BTW there are 3 lines with append="..." in my lilo.conf file. Which one should i change?

:study:

Nevermind. It's working now.
:newbie:

Actually, that's incorrect. A hard link can be anywhere on the same filesystem, not just in the same directory. It actually points to the same spot on the disk, so for all intents and purposes, it's the same as the origional file except with a different name. If the origional file is deleted, the hard link remains intact. With a sym[bolic] link, if the origional is deleted, you just have a broken link... the file (or directory) is gone.