[SOLVED]: Automagically Automount Floppy Drive
Ubuntu 5.10 need help with this nightmare:
Floppy will NOT 'auto'mount whatever. Code:
# pmount /dev/fdo I have installed ivman which, according to the logs, raises no errors bit still the floppy file system is not there. In MDK10 there was no problem since automount is/was a standard kernel module. What to do with Ubuntu? I need to have the floppy drive seen without user intervention since I am running a GUI with PHP interface. |
If I understud you right, you can't auto mount the floppy drive if there is no disk in the drive, It's like saying "I cant mount my cd drive when there's no cd in it". There is no filesystem to mount.
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If what you say is true, how come Mandrake have the filesystems for both CD and Floppy when no media is present? |
It may have a link to mount and open the drive on the desktop, but if there is no media in the drive it can't be mounted.
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Sorry bin, on the MDK10 system if I type mount I get, amongst other things:
... none on mnt/floppy type supermount (rw,sync,dev=/dev/fd0,fs=ext2:vfat . . . . ... without any disk in the drive. I get the same result when I do put a disk in the drive and ls it. |
Well, that's just weard to me. On ubuntu, as with all the other dists i've used that I can think of (mostly debian based), you can only mount the floppy drive when there is a media in the drive (a filesystem to mount).
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Yeah, wierd maybe but it works on MDK10.
Seems the only option I have is to downgrade to 2.6.16 kernel (I have 2.6.17) and apply a supermount patch:( |
It doesn't make sense to mount nonexistant media. Don't bother downgrading the kernel.
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OK so why don't I stick with MDK? Have you used Mandrake?? If they ever get the USB interface working solidly .... |
I think that you forgot to umount the floppy or use the sync command to write the cache to the floppy disk, when you looked at the mount command. The entire floppy may have been cached to disk. Or Mandrake had no way of knowing that the floppy was ejected. Maybe both. Floppy drives aren't as smart as CDROM drives. There may not be a signal to say that the floppy was ejected, unless the device periodically tests it. If you ever had an Amiga computer, it was a different story. The drive would periodically click, because it would test that there was a device present.
It may depend on the floppy drive and the device. Maybe newer ones will signal when a disk is inserted. You could probably test this by monitoring (tail -f) /var/log/messages while inserting a disk. Also check if Ubuntu uses udev or not. |
ubuntu uses udev, can you not try using autofs to mount the floppy drive?
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mount/pmount/umount/pumount not required. Quote:
Also it may be I have autofs compiled into the kernel since I have two kernel object files: (1) /lib/modules/uname -r/kernel/fs/autofs/autofs.ko (2) /lib/modules/uname -r/kernel/fs/autofs4/autofs4.ko How can I tell if they are running? Neither shows with: Code:
# ps -A | grep autofs Neither autofs or autofs4 are listed in any of the rc?.d or init.d directories. |
I was talking about the autofs package (which uses autofs4.ko), I'm not sure what autofs.ko is for (maybe an older version?). There is an official howto here
I don't need to use autofs myself, the hal daemon and hotplug do that for me (this PC didn't even come with a FDD). |
TY for that.
I'll come back later when I've studied it.:study: |
More on autofs
I have been through the following checks:
(a) Can I load and see a kernel autofs module? Code:
# modprobe autofs However, I am at a loss, having searched for a day, as to how to get autofs loaded at boot time. I know that there should be a script in /etc/init.d/ which tells the loader how to use autofs and there should be several /etc/auto.* configuration files and I should have symbolic links in /etc/rc?.d/ directories. I could attempt to install another version of autofs using Synaptic which may generate these missing components but am concerned that in doing so I install an incomaptible version and break my system. Can someone help as to how to manually set up these missing files/links since none of the HOWTOs I have seen tell me?:( |
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