[lug] floppy drive

John Karns jkarns at csd.net
Tue Dec 18 12:57:52 MST 2001


FYI, here's an answer to a very similar question which just appeared on
another mail list ...

On 17-Dec-01 Ron Langdon wrote:
>
>
> Dumb newbie here! Got this error trying to access floppy drive in
> konquer desktop mandrake 8.1 release.  ( mount: /dev/fd0: unknown device)
> Please help if you can i'm trying to get drivers for my modem off the
> floppy.


Hi Ron,

it seems the mount command to access the floppy fails. The reason given is
that the device itself does not exist.

please check that at boot time a floppy is indeed found and announced.
"dmesg" on a shell will show these messages again.

"cat /proc/devices"
should show something like:

Block devices:
  1 ramdisk
  2 fd
  3 ide0
  7 loop
  [...]


Then have a look if the device is actually there

ll /dev/fd0

if not, is there something like /dev/floppy ?

If there is nothing like that you have to create the device node, using mknod
directly or whatever frontend mandrake has for this.

There is a "devices" file somewhere (in kernel source tree I think,
something like /usr/src/linux/Documentation/devices.txt -- sorry I can't
check here, "they" decided to have no kernel sources on the system). Have a
look at that to find out what major and minor device number the block device
"floppy" should have and give them to mknod:

mknod /dev/fd0 -b 2 0

to access floppies with different sizes there are *lots* more of defined
/dev/fd* entries here, but standard 1.44MB should work with the one above.


Or like Huibert just suggested mandrake button is linked to a mistyped script
command. Try by typing the mount command on the shell yourself. If that is
the problem find out how to teach mandrake the new command for that button.



K.-H.

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John Karns                                        jkarns at csd.net





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