[lug] floppy drive

[J. Wayde Allen]

On Sun, 16 Dec 2001, it was written:

> I can't get my floppy to work, both distros say fd0 doesn't exist.  
> I've checked several books, apparently you need to activate access somehow 
> first, the only book I could find about doing this said to use linuxconf, 
> apparently it's easy to get to on RH but I can't find it on either of my 
> distros.

I'm not typically a RedHat user so can't offer much help with linuxconf.  
However, we are going to need a bit more info in order to help you here.  
What specifically have you done to try accessing the floppy?

> Linux's obviously better design is obscured with it's sheer volume of
> features and documentation.

Yes, I'd agree with that.  It isn't that the stuff isn't documented, but
that finding the documentation you need can be pretty daunting.  I'm not
too certain that there is a good solution to this problem, and I'm even
less certain that the GUI approach is "the" solution either.  Certainly
things can be done to improve the systems usability, but one also has to
be careful about oversimplification too.  For example, people also complain
that knives are dangerous and can cut and kill, but a knife without a
sharp cutting edge isn't terribly useful.

> Anyway, pardon my rant, feedback on my floppy drive question 
> would be tremendously welcome.   Dale Andersen

Without knowing what you've been trying to do lets start with the item
that I think confuses most newbies.  Hopefully this won't sound too
pedantic, my apologies if it does.

First of all, *nix is based on a different design philosophy than many of
the other popular OS's.  Rather than thinking of the OS as a monolithic
entity that you just use, the *nix environment is more like a truck load
of bricks that you can use to build your own personalized castle.  This is
a really powerful concept, but is hard for the newbie to grasp since they
usually come from the commercial OS world where they are used to
purchasing ready made mobile homes.  (You can think of a Linux
distribution as a model house that you can remodel at will.)  To get a
feel for the basic design philosophy I started typing up a more or less
weekly newbie column that ran here for a while.  It is of course in the
archives, but is also available at <http://lug.boulder.co.us/docs.html>.

The thing that confused me when switching to Linux was that I was very
familiar with formating and using hard drives and floppies under
MSDOS/MSWindows, but this didn't seem to work under Linux.  Where for
instance were drives a:\ or b:\ ?  Since you mention that one must
"activate access somehow" I'm guessing that you are referring to mounting
the drive?  This is really the key.  Mounting is the act of assigning the
physical disk to a directory in the root file system.  MSWindows uses the
letter designations (a:\, b:\, c:\, etc.) to automate this process, but
Linux lets you decide what to call the drive, and where to put it in your
directory structure. Under Linux you'd create a mount directory (/floppy
is common), and then use the mount command to connect the device /dev/fd0
to this location.  In other words, you'd plug your floppy disk into the
drive and then as root type:

    mount /dev/fd0 /floppy

in order to map the contents of the floppy onto the /floppy directory.  
Again for comparison, MSWindows basically just maps the contents of the
floppy to the name a:\.  Yes, this process can be automated under Linux,
but for know let's just get your floppy mounted and readable.

Under Linux the act of formating a disk is called "creating a filesystem".  
The command to do this is "mkfs" so I'd suggest looking at the man page
for this.  Type "man mkfs".  This is complicated by the fact that one has
a choice of which file system to use.  However, to keep this relatively
short I'm not going to cover that.  For comparison purposes, keep in mind
that MSWindows really only has the one file system so the choice has
already been made for you.

So to summarize you'd first become the root user in order to use the file
system commands.  Plug a floppy into the drive, and format it by typing:

   mkfs /dev/fd0

you would then mount the drive to the floppy directory by typing:

   mount /dev/fd0 /floppy

you can then do what you want with it until you are ready to remove the
disk.  Then you'd again become root and unmount the floppy by typing

   umount /floppy

Hope this helps.  If I've completely missed the point, feel free to fill
us in with more details so we can more effectively answer your question.

- Wayde
  (wallen at lug.boulder.co.us)

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