Floppy disk problems

**Jakykong** · 11-18-2004, 11:02 PM

Ok, there is a floppy icon on my desktop(HD install). It leads to /mnt/floppy but sais that doesent exist. So i made my own and pointed it to /dev/fd0. This worked but showed a set of files (on an empty floppy).

The files:
!desktop.fol !openfol.der desktop finder.dat resource.frk

This is, again, an empty floppy. It should have no files.

The problems did not stop there. I cannot modify them once i click on the icon i made, and i cannot unmount the floppy that i made. (it sais it is busy, but my floppy drive is doing nothing)

Can anyone help?

**Jakykong** · 11-19-2004, 05:00 AM

Maybe i should mention that it did exactly the same thing on my live CD. Also, i tried multiple floppies and even tried replacing the floppy drive....

**OErjan** · 11-19-2004, 05:32 PM

Short answer
if you pionted it to /dev/fd0 you made a loooop. werid things can happen then.
longer answer.
make the directory /mnt/floppy
the reason being that the mountpoint is where the files will be when you have mounted the drive, nothing motre than that.
it could be any empty directory you point it to, most common are /floppy, /mnt/floppy or /mnt/auto/floppy, which are created with this only reason for being.

The /dev part of the tree is where the "hardware" is represented, that is the actual floppydrive, cdrom, mouse...
mounting it there will SERIOUSLY confuse linux.

your fstab should have a line in it that will read something like this.

Code:

/dev/fd0         /mnt/floppy      auto        noauto,owner     0   0

the first part tells Linux that you want floppydrive /dev/fd0 to be acessible in /mnt/floppy.
that it should autoprobe filesystem and that it should not be automounted at boot, owner is the one with permisions to do anything (users,gid=users might be another way), 0 0 means that it should not be included in some backupscripts, filesystemchecks...
if you want more information let me know. i wil try to explain.
i might have failedn to get information across here, somehow it feels that way.

**stuart_b** · 11-22-2004, 11:59 PM

Hey wait... Those files sound like what SHOULD be on an "empty" floppy, that was accessed by a Macintosh. If there had been files there, and they were deleted on a Mac, that is exactly what should be seen.

For some reason (at least that's what it looks like in 3.6), the floppy icon created on install to hard drive wants to mount /dev/fd0 as /mnt/floppy, but fstab points to mounting it as /floppy. And /mnt/floppy is a link to something that only exists when amd (automount daemon) does its magic. So you're left with re-creating the desktop icon to point to the right mountpoint--easy, as they default to the mountpoints set up in fstab. Or you could edit fstab to point to /mnt/floppy, and hope amd does its thing.

On a PC where there was a second floppy (fd1) I had to do it all manually, including creating the mountpoint (i.e., an empty directory).

I'm not sure why the files can't be modified, as the default settings in fstab should let all users have access to them--though the Macintosh thing may mean something, if it was OS X, and has UNIX permissions to deal with. The usual reason someone can't unmount a disk is that the contained filesystem is still displayed in a file manager or command prompt session.

**finder** · 11-23-2004, 02:29 AM

To the list;
There has been a number of posts about this problem. I believe that it is often caused by a hacker deleting files. These are some of the posts over the missing file or inablility to mount or find the floppy.

other posts are;

file:/mnt/floppy does not exist
help with floppy
where oh where is my floppy

I am sure that this is a few others but this is somewhat of a common problem.

let me know what you think

thanks again

finder

**Jakykong** · 11-23-2004, 04:21 AM

Maybe ju8st cause my (rather limited) introduction to linux has been almost excluseively in kde, but i have no idea what fstab is... can't check it if i don't know what it is. Also, nether /floppy OR /mnt/floppy exist... Just to clarify, should i create it manually, or is there something else i need to do?

Actually, i am not so new to this kind of environment. I have a UNIX computer, but it's definately not as similar as i thaught it was.

The floppy was NEVER accessed by a mac. It is in the FAT file system, since my windows comp can read it, and as far as i can tell, macs can't read FAT. I could be wrong, i never used a mac, but i formatted this floppy and it still showed me those files.

Right now i am using a live CD to solve the problem, i was going to solve it on my HD install after i get the darn floppy drive working on live... A suggestion of someone else in my other current topic about my flash device...

Anyway, Thanks for all the help. As soon as i can find fstab i will check it.

**OErjan** · 11-23-2004, 06:58 PM

yes you can just create the /floppy (or whatever) dir manually (mkdir /floppy)

**Harry Kuhman** · 11-23-2004, 08:05 PM

Originally Posted by OErjan

yes you can just create the /floppy (or whatever) dir manually (mkdir /floppy)

Why would he have to do this? Does the icon Knoppix provides not do all the steps needed to open a floppy like it does a hard drive? (I normally run Knoppix on a floppy-less notebook, so I can't just test this myself but would really like to understand this problem).