Floppy drive diagnostic tool

[gadgerama]

Anyone know of a diagnostic tool I can use to check my floppy disk drive? It's knackered in linux and windows, but is listed in the bios. When trying to access a floppy, the light comes on for a few seconds and then an error msg appears.

I'm running a dual-boot knoppix 3.8 and win98 system.

Error msgs in Linux are:

mount: /dev/fd0: can't read superblock

Error msgs in win98 are:

a:\ is not accessible. The device is not ready.

Looking at /dev/fstab gives me this:

/dev/fd0 /floppy vfat defaults,user,noauto,showexec,umask=022 0 0

Any ideas on how to resolve this are welcome (except the one with the badger, it died and smells bad).

G

[OErjan]

hmm, have it worked before and now just died or is it a recent install. have you have the cabinet open ? if you have you should check the cable is fully seated.
if it just died, hmm have you cleaned it?
just make sure you HAVE conected tha cable, both right way and on right contact.

[gadgerama]

I don't think I've done anything out of the ordinary - it just seems to have stopped working (it is and old drive though - 6 years). I'll get the box open later on and check the cable, and I'll post back what I find.

Thx.

[OErjan]

if you have NOT opened the box or thumped it much lately that seems NOT to be the problem.

[gadgerama]

You're right - I swapped cables and still got the same symptoms, leading me to believe that it's the device that's the problem. Oh well, I'll be buying a new pc soon so I'm not going to lose any sleep over this.

Thx for your help!

[OErjan]

a new floppydrive is easily found for less than 10€ so...