Floppy disk inaccessible in Mandrake 9

[surprise]

I am new to Linux and have Mandrake 9. installed in dual boot with Win98. Everything works fine except the floppy. There is an icon for floppy in my /home/removable media directory. When I attempt to mount a floppy formatted with lfloppy or gfloppy as user I get a response tjat I do not have access permission. When I attempt to do so as root I get the respones

: input/ output error or
cannot access /mnt/floppy. you do not have access rights.

kfloppy and gfloppy formats with ext2 fs.

Funny thing is I can mount a floppy formatted under win98, copy files to and from that floppy into a linux folder of my chosing.
The fstab file reads:

none /mnt/floppy supermount dev=/dev/fdo,fs=auto,--,iocharset=iso8859-1,sync,codepage=850,umask=0 0 0


/dev folder shows /dev/fdo exists.

Someone at the mandrake mailing list said that this is a pronlem with ext2 fs in Mandrake. If so, why include Kfloppy and gfloppy in the distro, I wonder. I hope there is a bwetter solution. Help!!!

[michaelk]

I had this same problem but once I rebooted it never returned. You also might want to try disabling supermount to see if that is causing a problem.

Have you tried to manually format the floppy using
the mke2fs command?

[mdwatts]

Is "dev=/dev/fdo" a typo as it should be fd0 (zero) as in "dev=/dev/fd0".

Try adding 'users' to your fstab.

none /mnt/floppy supermount dev=/dev/fdo,fs=auto,--,iocharset=iso8859-1,sync,codepage=850,users,umask=0 0 0

[surprise]

micheaelk:
I have rebooted many times but it does not help. How do I disable supermount?

mdwatts:
dev=/dev/fdo was a typ. It IS "dev=/dev/fd0. I will try editing fstab to add users per your suggestion and report back.

[michaelk]

As root:

supermount disable

man supermount for more details


Does /dev/fd0 exist?

[surprise]

michaelk:
/dev/fd0 exists as I can access dos formatted discs by clicking on the icon for floppy and also from a console using cd /mnt/floppy and issuing command "ls". I have manually formattied the floppy with mk2fs command. But access problem remained same as before.

Another question before I try disabling "supermount". Redhat does not have itin their 7.2 distro. What exactly is it supposed to do? Does the man page explain this?

[michaelk]

I believe I am getting the picture now. You are correct MDK uses supermount and RH does not.

Supermount allows the linux PC to behave like a windows PC i.e. insert and remove floppies and CDROMs without mounting/umounting. The supermount enables / disables this automatic mounting feature. Trying to manually (i.e. the mount command) a floppy or cdrom should fail. The mount command without any options will actually show the floppy as mounted without actually anything inserted.

However with the fs=auto option in the /etc/fstab file you should be able to view a ext2 floppy the same as a MSDOS formatted floppy.

On my system I can't format a floppy with it mounted so the GUI command kfloppy fails. When I manually unmounted the floppy drive I could.

I only use MSDOS formatted floppies but I will see if I can format an ext2 floppy and try to mount it on my MDK 9 PC latter.

So what happens if you unmount the floppy and manually mount it as root like

mount -t ext2 /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy

[michaelk]

I can manually mount the ext2 formated floppy disk with fstype auto or ext2. mount fails as mount /mnt/floppy with either auto or ext2 in fstab.

As well as any user can't mount an ext2 formated floppy.

Is this a MDK unique problem?

[surprise]

mandrake 9 as root
mount -t ext2 /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy failed with response bad "-----".
then tried:
mke2fs /dev/fd0
mount -t ext2 /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy--> ok
cd /mnt/floppy
cp <file> -- ok
ls -- list shows file and could access file in window
exited root
logged in as user
tried mounting same floppy with various commands--> could not access floppy. no access permission
as root chown floppy to user. changed back to user.
tried again command did not work. changed back to root. Ttried to access floppy. Did not work.

Now what? Problem with Mandrake? and if so where do we report the bug?