can't read floppy

[davidjr]

I have a floppy I could read in 7.1. I just installed 10.04 and cannot read the disk. In the home places panel, it recognizes the floppy but when I put the curser on it, it says "mount and read disk". When I left click, nothing happens. When I right click, menu options include "open" and "identify media" When I click on these, nothing happens. I have "fdutils" installed. Best I can tell, that is the only floppy software installed. Thanks for any help.

[dolo724]

Is your floppy drive internal or a USB drive? fdutils has trouble accessing the USB drivers and therefore a USB-floppy.
Now for the "stupid questions": Is the drive making "read-noises" when you try to access it? Is the disk seated correctly in the drive? Is this a Thinkpad?

[davidjr]

It is an internal drive. It does not make those grinding sounds. Disk is seated properly. I have removed and reinserted several times. Remember, it worked under 7.1.

[jjge]

Does 10.4 still support FAT (Dosfs)? Can you format a (spare) floppy with mkdosfs? Does /dev/fd0 or /dev/fd1 exist?

[tornow]

It might be that newer kernels don't include the module for floppies anymore.
Try to load it:

modprobe floppy

Trouble mounting FAT drive and floppy - Ubuntu Forums

good luck.

[dolo724]

hehehe... dodo, I like that.

jjge and tornow have good thoughts, and I thought of this earlier today:
use separate term-windows to see realtime results with tail -f /var/log/messages in one term, then try to access the drive using CLI in the second term.
any errors will show immediately, as well as in messages.

[davidjr]

I tried modprobe floppy and nothing happened. It just showed the command line again,
I tried /dev/fd0 and got this message bash: /dev/fd0: Permission denied

[davidjr]

I tried your 1st suggestion and got a string of messages relating to installing my printer earlier today. I did the CLI and got this:
david@leibnitz:~$ CLI
CLI: command not found
david@leibnitz:~$

[jjge]

I tried modprobe floppy and nothing happened. It just showed the command line again,
I tried /dev/fd0 and got this message bash: /dev/fd0: Permission denied

Well, the former is normal; if there are no errors, Unix remains silent (Windows might say OK, even in the presence of errors).

But the other message clearly indicates that the device exists. So that is not the problem. You might also try "less /proc/filesystems" (without the quotes) and check for the presence of "vfat", but I guess it will be there.

I tried your 1st suggestion and got a string of messages relating to installing my printer earlier today. I did the CLI and got this:
david@leibnitz:~$ CLI
CLI: command not found
david@leibnitz:~$

Hmm, that figures. CLI is not a command. It is the command line interface (which u were using already).

Well, maybe your floppy has gone bad in the meantime? Such things happen. Mount or insert it on another machine to check.

[tornow]

I tried /dev/fd0 and got this message bash: /dev/fd0: Permission denied

For a short test try to mount it as root.

$ su
# mkdir /media/floppy
# mount /dev/fd0 /media/floppy

In case that works make an entry in /etc/fstab

/dev/fd0       /media/floppy  auto rw,user,noauto  0       0

I am not sure, cause mounting is difficult (for me). I get it done, but am never so sure.
Good luck


Ups, sorry. You can do all of that from the graphical interface. With gedit and nautilus.