Can't mount 720k floppy in 11.1

[Mike_unique]

OpenSUSE 11.1 64 bit w/ KDE 3.5

When I try and mount a 720k IBM FAT formatted floppy using a right click on the floppy desktop icon , then left click mount, after a delay I get this error window:

Error-kio_media_mounthelper
mount: you must specify the filesystem type

Fedora Core 8 with KDE mounts and read/writes this floppy, Windown 2000 Pro SP 4 read/writes this floppy. OpenSUSE 11.0 32 bit KDE has the same error.

I can mount 1.44 mb floppies in both of the above OpenSUSE releases.

Before you tell me how old 720k floppies are, please note that I have perfectly working logic analyzers that are stuck with these old floppies as their only portable storage media.

[arcull]

Hi, you could try to specify filesystem type via vfstype parameter, check mount(8): mount file system - Linux man page

[Mike_unique]

I already looked at mount(8) and fat12, fat16 and fat32 are all fat, and fat is part of msdos, umsdos and vfat. Since the mount operation is embedded with the supplied floppy desktop icon, I would rather see it work like it already works in Fedora 8. That is why I didn't try manually mounting it before.

Just to make sure mount works under SUSE I did manually mount the 720 kb floppy and it worked without complaint:
mount -v -t vfat /dev/fd0 /media

However, this SUSE mount:
mount -v -t auto /dev/fd0 /media
failed with this error:

mount: you must specify the filesystem type

So I tried this on the Fedora 8 box:
mount -v -t auto /dev/fd0 /media
and because of the -v it had these messages:

mount: you didn't specify a filesystem type for /dev/fd0
         I will try type vfat

It works on the Fedora box. Don't tell me SUSE has broken something in mount(8)?

I suppose the work around is to start a root shell and manually mount and unmount these 720 kb floppies every time from the shell. What a royal pain in the rear!

BTW, the floppy desktop icon doesn't show the manually mounted floppy as mounted, but it opens it with a message that is it already mounted.

[ErikEngerd]

I have a similar problem. On one machine (Pentium 4) I have both SuSE Linux 10.1 and Open SuSE 11.1 installed.

The floppy mounts fine on 10.1 with

mount /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy

On 11.1 I get

mount: you must specify the filesystem type

and if I specify the file type using

mount -v -t vfat /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy/

I get the following message:

mount: /dev/fd0: can't read superblock

It looks like something is broken in 11.1. Still floppy support would be good to have because it can be useful (such as for writing firmware updates for the motherboard on it).

Cheers
Erik

[ken_yap]

I think that a few people discovered that autodetection of fstype doesn't work with 720k floppies. Just file a bug at bugzilla.novell.com and see the devs say.

[john_hudson]

For anyone who has not installed openSuSE, I found many versions ago that plugging in the floppy drive while installing avoided this problem. I've just tried it and my floppy was recognised and read immediately.

It appears as user messagebus, group root and all the files on the disk can be opened.

I hope this information may help those who understand things better than I do to suggest a solution.

[ErikEngerd]

I have a similar problem. On one machine (Pentium 4) I have both SuSE Linux 10.1 and Open SuSE 11.1 installed.

The floppy mounts fine on 10.1 with

mount /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy

On 11.1 I get


and if I specify the file type using

I get the following message:



It looks like something is broken in 11.1. Still floppy support would be good to have because it can be useful (such as for writing firmware updates for the motherboard on it).

Cheers
Erik

I made some progress. I was seeing this problem when running the xen kernel. Nevertheless, switching to the pae kernel solved the problem.

Therefore, I am seeing another issue which is that the floppy drive apparently does not work in a xen kernel.