Floppy Access is Really Wierd!

[sburtchin]

Took 45 minutes to copy files to my floppy drive! Drive goes crazy if I try to access it from File Manager. Konquerer says it is not mounted, but it reads/writes just like Windows (ie. I can swap in/out different physical disks - from command line). Once I try to look at it from File Manager, everything changes. The SuSE Help says I have to mount the floppy drive first, but if I try to mount it as root, it says it is already mounted. I tried and failed 3 times to create the Rescue Floppy with YaST. These are just some of the wierd problems.

OK, I will try to describe the problem more coherently:

/etc/fstab

/dev/fd0             /media/floppy        subfs      noauto,fs=floppyfss,procuid,nodev,nosuid,sync 0 0
/dev/fd1             /media/floppy1       subfs      noauto,fs=floppyfss,procuid,nodev,nosuid,sync 0 0

/etc/mtab

/dev/fd1 /media/floppy subfs rw,nosuid,nodev,noatime,fs=floppyfss,procuid 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy_1 subfs rw,nosuid,nodev,noatime,fs=floppyfss,procuid 0 0

There are three floppy related folders in /media (only two of which ever get used):

"floppy", "floppy1" and "floppy_1"

Note that /dev/fd1 gets mounted where /dev/fd0 should be. I'm pretty sure this is because the "Base URL's" are "file:///media/floppy" and "file:///media/floppy_1". I googled for "Base URL" and searched "/etc" recursively for files containing the string "media/floppy_1", but found nothing to hint where these come from.

I can't mount the floppies like Help says I have to because they are already mounted (but fstab has the "noauto" option). I can put a floppy into either drive and do whatever from the command line. But Knoquerer continues to claim that they are not mounted. I can swap disks in the drives as I please without unmounting them as long as I stick to the command line, but if I do "umount" then "mount" things start to get wierd.

If I try to create the Rescue Floppy with YaST, I cannot use that drive in any way until I reboot.

If I access either floppy drive with File Manager, it will read and display the disk's contents OK, but it will pause about 1 second, then read the disk again. It then continues to pause and read the disk indefinitely until I kill File Manager. Unmounting and even physically removing the disk does not help. Once I had to shut down to get it to stop. After one of these episodes, floppy access becomes extremely slow with frequent "stalled" messages when copying files.

I am new to Linux and have no idea why these don't work like the SuSE Help says they should. Please help - thanks.

[sburtchin]

Could someone please help me determine if I really have a problem, or if am I just doing it wrong. Suppose I want to copy some files onto a blank formatted (FAT12) floppy with File Manager. What exactly would I do? Please break it down into every detail. Thanks.