How do I use the floppy disk drive? Fresh installation of 11.1 with KDE. When I try to use the floppy disk dive it does not work! Dolphin gives me this message:
“An error occurred while accessing ‘PC Floppy Drive’, the system responded: org.freedesktop.Hal.Device. Volume.AlreadyMounted Device /dev/fd0/is already mounted.”
I know that the drive is okay because I can put a DOS boot disk in and boot in to DOS from the grub menu on start up.
I am a new comer to Linux and I thought the floppy drive would just work like it does in Windows. Any help most welcome. Thanks
Looks to me like the floppy drive was detected and mounted maybe under /media or /mnt. In any Unicee, all devices are mounted off the root tree (/). This differs from Windows/DOS products where an explicit drive letter is assigned. A few points to consider to try and nail down where the problem is…
If trying to read a DOS/Windows disk did you install the floppy utilities?
In file manager can you navigate to /mnt/floppy or /media/floppy to see it’s contents?
Sometimes you need to umount /dev/fd0 before taking out the floppy
Sorry been a while since I used the floppy, but hopefully this helps to give you some options
Many thanks for your help. I have installed the kfloppy utility (ostensibly for formatting floppy disks). I select ‘PC Floppy Drive’ in Dolphin, the computer reads the disk and the selection in Dolphin jumps to ‘Root’ with no explanation. If I select ‘PC Floppy Drive’ drive again I get the error message mentioned earlier. However, if I follow your suggestion and browse to /media, ‘disk-2’ has now appeared and if I open this I can see my files.
Having experimented it seems much better to use Konqueror (Application Launcher > Applications > System > File Manager [not the Konqueror web browser]) for floppy disk access. Choose the System tab on the left, then expand Storage Media, then select the Floppy Drive icon and the files are displayed as one would expect. Swapping disks is a little more difficult than Windows because I have to right click the Floppy Drive icon and select Unmount before swapping disks and hitting F5 to refresh the view.
I suspect the problem is that you are using KDE4.1.3. The problems you describe went in KDE4.2 and I regularly plug in and unplug a floppy drive with no need to unmount.
That was necessary under KDE3 and I suspect the floppy drive services are still being supplied by KDE3 on your system.
My Suse 11.3 (KDE) suffers from the same problem with the exact same error message. Could not find any resolution for it yet; the advice provided here was not much help. (Kfloppy utility has been installed.)
Hope someone who found a fix will post it here.
PS When booted into GNOME and clicking on floppy in Dolphin the same error message is displayed but it causes a floppy icon to appear on the desktop which functions normally. This does not occur with KDE.