Access to floppy freezes system (Supermount already disabled)

Mr. Gone · 03-09-2004, 10:47 AM

I use Mandrake 9.1. When I first installed it, the system always froze whenever I tried to access any directory under /mnt/. I already knew about 'supermount' problems in other versions of Mandrake, so I disabled it and after then I could access my mounted drives (HDs and CDs) under /mnt/ without problem... except the floppy, which continued to freeze the system right away even with 'supermount' disabled.

As I seldom use floppies, I parked the problem for a while, but now I'm need of accessing some old 3'5'' disks and I'm trying to solve it. I tried to use 'mcopy' to copy the floppy content, as -according to the man page of 'mtools'- "commands such as 'mdir a:' work on the a: floppy without any preliminary mounting or initialization (assuming the default `/etc/mtools.conf' works on your machine). With mtools, one can change floppies too without unmounting and mounting".

However, trying to copy the floppy contents with 'mcopy' produced the same result, and the system froze immediately.

As the floppy drive works OK in Windows, this situation puzzles me. So if any of you guys could throw some light on the subject, I would deeply appreciate it.

Many thanks in advance.

schlawiener · 04-05-2004, 05:20 AM

I have the same problem on a RedHat 9 (kernel 2.4.20-27.9). Whenever I try to access a floppy, the system freezes: no mouse, no keyboard, the screen freezes, etc. This is not an X Server problem, because it is the same without X. I once had RedHat 7.1 installed on the same machine for a short time, and it worked fine, so I guess it is not a hardware problem.

If someone has an idea, I would really appreciate it. Thanks a lot in advance.

Schlawiener

AutOPSY · 04-05-2004, 12:44 PM

try using mount to mount a floppy from the console(no X running)

and if you did that already and it doesnt work, its related to your mothorbaord, IRQ for the drive, or something, or get a patch.

schlawiener · 04-05-2004, 02:47 PM

Hello Autopsy,

thanks for the reply. I already tried that on the console, it is the same. The maotherboard is a ASUS P4S8X-X. When I realsized the problem for the first time, I checked the IRQs (though I must admit I don´t know anymore how I did this, I found some instructions on the web), and everything so far looked OK.

Can you give me some advice which patch would be worth trying?

Regards,

Schlawiener