Normally, I have a floppy drive in my computer. Well, I took it out a few days ago. Then I booted Linux. It booted OK, but during shut down it went nuts! It kept trying to unmount the floppy drive and it gave me all sorts of wierd messges. Finally, about 10 minutes later, it shut down.

Why does it do that? Ain't Linux smart enough to know whether or not there's a floppy drive?

what are the weird msg? can u post it here?

You probably have an entry for /dev/fd0 or /dev/floppy in /etc/fstab. That's just a guess, but remove it and see.

Cheers,

Finegan

but will linux try to unmount a not mounted device?

If that device is no longer referenced in fstab, then Linux will not mount it nor will it un-mount it. However, you should have first manually un-mounted the floppy, physically removed it, and then removed the fstab entry. Since you didn't, just remove the fstab entry and reboot. It will take time, but once the re-boot is done you should have no more problems.

OK, here's a short overview of what happens when you mount/unmount stuff:

1. mount mounts the device to the directory you specified
2. mount adds the device to /etc/mtab. That file stores currently mounted filesystems.

As you can see, if you somehow unmounted the floppy without modifying /etc/mtab, then my guess would be that Linux would try to unmount it, even though it's not mounted.

Sewer_monkey, the question was a little different. He yanked the physical drive and didn't delete the entry in /etc/fstab for /dev/fd0. He didn't do this while the machine was live; that would have backshot the powersupply and fried something (trust me, I know this the hard way ). However, since the floppy entry created by his distro, my guess is RH, Mandy, or SuSe, would have had noauto as a parameter, it might have hiccuped an error about there being no /dev/fd0 on init, that he probably missed especially if he had a gui init or a fast machine where everything scrolls by at mach 3.

What I'm still kind of wondering is why this would make a box go kazoo on shutdown and if that was indeed it, the fstab entry. I've had machines not go wonky (spit errors, but not crash) when I yank one of their physical hard drives and left the entry, so why I'm wondering would a floppy be different. I could experiment myself, but that would mean I would have to A) install one of the gummy distros on a machine around here with a floppy drive. B) find my screwdriver, and or C) find an extra floppy drive.

Cheers,

Finegan

Hi
maybe is he using the supermount daemon, as it
causes me sometimes shutdown delay's and
giving some errors, though mainly concerning
the cdrom drive. So i turned it off