Mounting Floppy diskette problem on Redhat 8.0

[Jeffrey A. McCright]

Brad,

First off the only filesystem that a floppy under windows can support is
Fat12. Secondly, fdisk will not allow you to do anything to a floppy as
fdisk is a utility (Fixed DISK) for hard drive partitioning only whether
used in Windows or Linux.

First thing to look at is the /etc/fstab. In this file you should see an
entry like:

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

Or something very similar. If this line is not present, insert at the
end of your /etc/fstab file.

Next, chage directories to the /mnt directory and make sure that a
directory called floppy is found there. If not, create one using the
mkdir command such as:

  mkdir floppy

Then, I would just reboot the system and when the system comes up,
insert your floppy and log in as root. Then type the following:

   mount /dev/fd0

This should mount the floppy to the mount point /mnt/floppy.

Now you should be able to change to the /mnt/floppy directory and
manipulate the files found there.

Let me know if you continue to have trouble.

Thanks,

Jeff McCright

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-kclug at marauder.illiana.net
[mailto:owner-kclug at marauder.illiana.net] On Behalf Of brad
Sent: Tuesday, May 20, 2003 4:51 PM
To: kclug at kclug.org
Subject: Mounting Floppy diskette problem on Redhat 8.0

I would guess that you need to specify the file system type like the
error states.  If it was formatted on XP then it will probably be NTFS
or maybe FAT.  You could try:

mount -t ntfs /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy

However, you would need to have support for NTFS in your kernel and I
don't think it is there by default.

Brad

-----Forwarded Message-----

> From: Joe Pitts <pittspringdale at yahoo.com>
> To: kclug at kclug.org
> Subject: Mounting Floppy diskette problem on Redhat 8.0
> Date: 20 May 2003 13:20:32 -0700
> 
> Hello, KCLUG,
>  
> I have a newbie Linux question about how to mount a floppy diskette 
> that is formatted on Windows XP.
>  
> I tried to mount this diskette on the Redhat 8.0 desktop again and 
> again. but it keep saying that
>  
> "
> #[root at red root]#mount /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy
> /dev/fd0: Input/Output error
> mount : you must specify the filesystem type
> "
>  
> I don't know why it doesn't allow to mount this floppy diskette. I can

> access to this diskette on the Windows system, but not in Linux box.
>  
> What about my Linux box?
> Well, it is an Emachine Pentium 4 with 256MB RAM
> there is no other scsi disk or anything except CD-Writer come with.
>  
> I don't have any problem accessing CDROM.
>  
> when I check the file system mounting point /etc/fstab
> I have like this:
>  
> [root at red root]# cat /etc/fstab
> LABEL=/                 /                       ext3    defaults
1 1
> LABEL=/boot             /boot                   ext3    defaults
1 2
> none                    /dev/pts                devpts  gid=5,mode=620
0 0
> LABEL=/home             /home                   ext3    defaults
1 2
> none                    /proc                   proc    defaults
0 0
> none                    /dev/shm                tmpfs   defaults
0 0
> LABEL=/usr              /usr                    ext3    defaults
1 2
> LABEL=/var              /var                    ext3    defaults
1 2
> /dev/hda7               swap                    swap    defaults
0 0
> /dev/cdrom              /mnt/cdrom              iso9660
noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0
> /dev/cdrom1             /mnt/cdrom1             iso9660
noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0
> /dev/fd0                /mnt/floppy             auto
noauto,owner,kudzu 0 0
> [root at red root]#
>  
>  I haven't modified any parameter on this file yet after I installed.
>  
> Any recommendation?
>  
> Thanks in advance.
>  
> Joseph Pitts
> pittspringdale at yahoo.com
> 
> 
> 
> ---------------------------------
> Do you Yahoo!?
> The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.