Today I booted Knoppix 6.4.3 CD on my notebook (HP omnibook xt1000) with a USB floppy disk drive connected. There was no medium in the floppy drive. I issued hwinfo --floppy in a terminal and was surprised that the the command did not show any information about the floppy disk drive. I issued and found a long list of USB devices. One device was my USB floppy disk drive. It had got the device name /dev/sdb.
My next step was to open the PCMan Filemanager. I did not see any icon for the floppy disk drive. After I had inserted a floppy disk into the floppy disk drive there was activity in the floppy disk drive and in the PCMan Filemanager's left pane appeared a new icon. It had got the same name as the floppy disk. I clicked on that icon and in the PCMan Filemanager's right pane appeared the usual icons. The floppy disk's mount point was /media/sdb. When I removed the floppy disk from the drive the icons disappeared in the right pane of the file manager. In the left pane of the PCMan Filemanager vanished the floppy disk's icon.
After this success I took my Windows 7 Pro system with Oracle VirtualBox 3.2.12 installed. This system has got a traditional floppy disk drive built in. I had to add a floppy disk drive to my virtual maschine before I started Knoppix 6.4.3. I opened a terminal and issued hwinfo --floppy. Again there was no information about the floppy disk drive. But when I issued
Code:
hwinfo --storage-ctrl
I saw that there was floppy disk controller in the system. Afterwards I opened the PCMan Filemanager and inserted a floppy disk into the physical floppy disk drive. There was no icon for the floppy disk shown in the filemanager's window. Therefore I issued the commands I suggested in my previous post.
Code:
sudo mkdir /media/fd0
sudo mount -o uid=1000,gid=1000 /dev/fd0 /media/fd0
This time there was no special icon for the floppy disk drive but after I had moved to the directory /media/fd0 I found the files on the floppy disk. I closed the filemanager's window and issued
Code:
sudo umount /media/fd0
before I removed the floppy disk from the floppy disk drive.
My third attempt was to boot my PC from the Knoppix 6.4.3 CD. There was a similar experience as in the virtual maschine. But I after had plugged in my USB floppy disk drive the floppy disk was detected automatically as in the first attempt with the notebook.
Maybe there is a way to turn on an automount operation for the traditional floppy disk drives in Knoppix 6.4.3. But in the rare case that I need a floppy disk drive I can use my USB device.