Floppy drive not recognized

[jimtyler]

I'm running Ubuntu 10.04. When I boot the computer with the floppy drive installed, I can hear the disk turning for a few seconds, but once the computer is booted, it won't recognize the drive. There's an icon for it on the Computer-File Browser, but when I try to mount it, I get the error message: "no media in the drive", even though there is. I clicked on detect media, and the disk spun the first time, but on subsequent times, nothing happened. I've tried all three of my floppy disks, with the same results. They seem to work fine in Windows. Does anyone have an idea of what the problem might be. I'd be happy to hear it. Thanks.

Jim

[oz]

Make sure you have an entry for the floppy drive in the fstab file and it's not commented out, and that you have a mount point for it. You might need the dosfstools package installed too, but I'm not sure since I've not used a floppy in years.

[jimtyler]

Hi Oz,

Thanks for the quick reply. I assume you were talking about /etc/fstab. Here's the line in that file regarding the floppy, but I don't know what it means. Does it say anything about a mounting point?

#/dev/fd0 /media/floppy0 auto rw,user,noauto,exec,utf8 0 0#

Jim

[oz]

Hi Oz,

Thanks for the quick reply. I assume you were talking about /etc/fstab. Here's the line in that file regarding the floppy, but I don't know what it means. Does it say anything about a mounting point?

#/dev/fd0 /media/floppy0 auto rw,user,noauto,exec,utf8 0 0#

Jim

Yep, it's been commented out, but if you remove the "#" so that it looks like the following, you'll have a better chance of it working properly:

/dev/fd0        /media/floppy0  auto    rw,user,noauto,exec,utf8    0   0

That's assuming that you do have a mount point in /media for floppy0 and you have any required packages installed for the filesystems that you'll be using on the floppy drive.

[jimtyler]

Hi Oz,

I think I made a mistake by putting those #s at the front and back of the line to indicate it was code. In the file there are none, so I don't think it's been commented out. What next boss?

Jim

[oz]

You might be experiencing this bug:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...ux/+bug/441835

If you will read through the comments, you might find a solution if it is indeed the bug biting you.

[oz]

It was fixed for some according to this comment:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...5/comments/227

...of course, I'm not certain this is why it's not working for you, but maybe.