appears to be some kind of a supermount issue. i'm quite new, and need some assistance trouble shooting this. i have a p200mhz comp, and just freshly installed mandrake 9.0, and when i went to read the contents of my floppy disk (contains boot disk files), it gave an

• "error displaying folder"
  "sorry, couldn't display all the contents of "floppy""

/ect/fstab states (w/ floppy in floppy drive):
none /mnt/floppy supermount dev=/dev/fd0,fs=auto,--,iocharset=iso8859-1,sync,codepage=850,umask=0 0 0

and /ect/mtab states:
none /mnt/floppy supermount rw,sync,dev=/dev/fd0,fs=auto,--,iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,umask=0 0 0

are these files correct, and if not what should be changed. alternatively, can i rewrite both files to not use supermount for the floppy? thanks in advance.

to see if it is indeed a supermount problem, disable supermount by using the command:
supermount -i disable
you have to be root to do this. You should back your /etc/fstab beforehand since this will make a few changes to your fstab (basically remove the supermount tags).
After this do as root
mount -a
supermount entries in mtab should be gone after this. If they are gone try to mount the floppy manually:
mount /mnt/floppy

actually, it seems that mount -a is not enough. Reboot the system after disabling the supermount.

quatsch, i think like you say mount -a isn't enough. i rebooted, and the floppy icon is gone, and tried 'mount /mnt/floppy', and get a message "mount: /dev/fdo is not a valid block device"

there is no reference to floppy, nor cd-rom in /ect/mtab

removing supermount did not solve the problem.