You are a genius, Rocky! The confusion arose with the references to floppy drives and scsi devices. It may want to be called an sda device, but it signs on as a hard drive - not surprisingly, because it IS an ATAPI device on the IDE line. If I try to change the icon to show an FDD or the label on the desktop to LS-120, it disappears again. It only likes to be called an hard drive. Each disc has to be individually mounted, and unmounted to remove it; there doesn't appear to an 'eject' option. But it works, at last. I can even read all my .wpd files from another OS in Kword, etc. Very many thanks to everyone who helped.
OG.