[CentOS] Mounting Floppies

William L. Maltby CentOS4Bill at triad.rr.com
Fri Jun 20 17:54:51 UTC 2008


On Fri, 2008-06-20 at 14:54 +0100, Nigel Kendrick wrote:
>  
> -----Original Message-----
> From: centos-bounces at centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces at centos.org] On Behalf
> Of William L. Maltby
> <snip>

> On Fri, 2008-06-20 at 09:54 +0100, Nigel Kendrick wrote:
> > Hi - daft one for Friday morning coffee break:
> >  
> > I have been trying to mount floppies on a couple of CentOS5 servers -
> > the usual "mount /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy" (yes, /mnt/floppy exists!).
> >  
> > On both servers, the mount command just doesn't come back and I have
> > to hit CTRL-C. I have tried different media and also changed the
> > floppy drive on one server, /dev/fd0 is seen as present on both
> > servers and they are enabled in the BIOS. I have formatted and tested
> > the floppies on my desktop PC without problems.
> >  
> > In the end, I gave up, stuck a USB floppy on one of the boxes and it
> > mounted with no problems.
> >  
> > So is it me, CentOS 5 or something else? (Ideas, anyone!?). It could
> > be a set of duff floppies and three flaky drives (two brand new), but
> > I thought I'd ask before I spend too much more time on it!
> 
> Here is support - it may not be you. I've successfully mounted and used
> FDs on this system in previous kernel releases.
> 
> Out of /var/log messages when I did an sfdisk -l /dev/fd0 and
> dd if=/dev/fd0 of=/dev/null count=1.
> 
> Jun 20 09:07:54 centos501 kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev fd0, sector 0
> Jun 20 09:08:06 centos501 kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev fd0, sector 0
> Jun 20 09:08:06 centos501 kernel: Buffer I/O error on device fd0, logical
> block 0
> Jun 20 09:08:18 centos501 kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev fd0, sector 0
> Jun 20 09:08:18 centos501 kernel: Buffer I/O error on device fd0, logical
> block 0
> 
> My dmesg has 
> 
>    Floppy drive(s): fd0 is 1.44M
>    FDC 0 is a post-1991 82077
> 
> If necessary (lack of prompt resolution on these lists) I'll "ribit" to
> an older kernel and see what happens. I suggest you might try that.
> <snip>

Does a "cluebat" look anything like a 6' 2x4? I forgot that last time I
went deep-case diving, I had removed the power connector from the
floppy. I hope that your worst result is that you too need this
"cluebat". :-)

Here is my diagnosis procedure in a little-more-than-required detail.

1. On "ribit", turn on floppy seek in the BIOS setup.
2. Hear silence, observe no floppy light
3. Pause, ... computational analysis by biological computer known to be
   more powerful than "Big Blue" (until recently anyway).
4. Upon the dawning of realization, search frantically for misplaced
   "cluebat".
5. <*sigh*>
6. Pummel oneself about the ears, severely, with aforementioned tool.
7. Open case, ... well "Now you know the rest of the story" (famous
   former radio broadcaster).

The first read attempt failed. Hmmm... Try again, it works. Sounds like
udev may not have finished set up. Anyway...

The confirmation of success was substantially easier. I did find it
interesting that the system recognizes the floppy even with no power.
Must be getting a necessary trickle through the floppy cable.

]# dd if=/dev/fd0 of=/dev/null count=1
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
512 bytes (512 B) copied, 4.4863e-05 seconds, 11.4 MB/s

# mount -t vfat /dev/fd0 /media/floppy/
[root at centos501 ~]# ls -l /media/floppy/
total 0
[root at centos501 ~]# df /media/floppy
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/fd0                  1424         0      1424   0% /media/floppy

Please let me know if you suffered the same error as I - loneliness
sucks and the list loves a good laugh at our (my, anybody's) expense.

HTH
-- 
Bill




More information about the CentOS mailing list