Getting my USB floppy to work

Aura_Bleu · 01-17-2005, 03:59 PM

Good evening,

I've just installed slackware 10 on my IBM thinkpad I series 1161 and I am having some troubl getting my US floppy drive to work correctly. If I keep the drive plugged in during boot time, the drive does power up, and it "sounds" like it is being detected as it does spin up for a brief time.

However when I try to mount the floppy drive, I get the following error:

Code:

bash-2.05b# mount /mnt/floppy
mount: /dev/fd0 is not a valid block device

And it will only let me mount it while logged in as root, or using su

here is a copy of my fstab file as well:

Code:

/dev/hda2        swap             swap        defaults         0   0
/dev/hda1        /                ext3        defaults         1   1
/dev/hda3        /home            reiserfs    defaults         1   2
/dev/cdrom       /mnt/cdrom       iso9660     noauto,owner,ro  0   0
/dev/fd0         /mnt/floppy      auto        noauto,owner     0   0
devpts           /dev/pts         devpts      gid=5,mode=620   0   0
proc             /proc            proc        defaults         0   0

Hope someone can help me here....

DaHammer · 01-17-2005, 04:51 PM

If it's a USB floppy then the kernel will assign it a USB device node, most likely /dev/sda, not /dev/fd0. During initial bootup (ie prior to the linux kernel loading) they are usually recognized as standard floppy drives, ie /dev/fd0, but this is something the BIOS provides so that they may be used as an initial boot device, a trick if you will. In order for it to work under Linux, the kernel will need USB support and USB Mass Storage support.