Last post here about a floppy drive was in 2017. Searching hasn’t helped elsewhere. Yet I have a stack of 3.5" floppy disks that I’d like to read. My often-updated desktop computer still has the FD, and the drive shows up in Dolphin. Inserting a disk and clicking on that FD icon produces an error message that /dev/fd0 is not a valid block device. The drive read OK around openSuse 11 (AFAI recall). Any way to read from oS 15.5? The BIOS if from 2010.
Thanks.
Should work as it did in earlier releases. I’m not running Leap any more, but I used a USB floppy in TW less than a year ago and it read disks just fine.
Be aware, though, that diskette media degrades over time - so that may also be an issue.
I’d take a look at the output from dmesg to see if any errors come up when the system tries to mount the diskette.
For the past 150+ minutes I’ve been trying. In each of these 3 oldies, loading 15.5 kernel and initrd by grub inexplicably takes multiple minutes. On the first computer I couldn’t produce any sort of acknowledgement that the floppy drive could work. Fiddling with cable and power connector proved futile. The activitiy light never would light, even after multiple trips into BIOS to make sure every enablement (4 that I found) was in the affirmative. With the second PC, I got a productive suggestion in /dev/: brw-rw---- 1 2, 0 Jul 19 02:00 /dev/fd0 existed, but its drive light never would light either, even after multiple BIOS changes and double checking cable and power connections. On PC #3, I got a wee bit further:
[ 147.420408] I/O error, dev fd0, sector 0 op 0x0:(READ) flags 0x0 phys_seg 1 prio class 0
[ 147.420428] floppy: error 10 while reading block 0
[ 147.456411] I/O error, dev fd0, sector 0 op 0x0:(READ) flags 0x0 phys_seg 1 prio class 0
[ 147.456431] floppy: error 10 while reading block 0
But this was with no floppy in the drive, and putting one in produced no further dmesg activity. So I booted 13.1 instead, and got this following boot:
# dmesg | grep ppy
[ 15.696191] Floppy drive(s): fd0 is 1.44M
# dmesg | tail
[ 37.942571] systemd-journald[564]: Received request to flush runtime journal from PID 1
[ 49.321575] RPC: Registered named UNIX socket transport module.
[ 49.321583] RPC: Registered udp transport module.
[ 49.321585] RPC: Registered tcp transport module.
[ 49.321587] RPC: Registered tcp NFSv4.1 backchannel transport module.
[ 49.457046] FS-Cache: Loaded
[ 49.612124] FS-Cache: Netfs 'nfs' registered for caching
[ 50.344078] Installing knfsd (copyright (C) 1996 okir@monad.swb.de).
[ 51.839284] NFSD: Using /var/lib/nfs/v4recovery as the NFSv4 state recovery directory
[ 51.857909] NFSD: starting 90-second grace period (net ffffffff81e926c0)
Then I put in a floppy, and got identical dmesg response:
# dmesg | tail
[ 37.942571] systemd-journald[564]: Received request to flush runtime journal from PID 1
[ 49.321575] RPC: Registered named UNIX socket transport module.
[ 49.321583] RPC: Registered udp transport module.
[ 49.321585] RPC: Registered tcp transport module.
[ 49.321587] RPC: Registered tcp NFSv4.1 backchannel transport module.
[ 49.457046] FS-Cache: Loaded
[ 49.612124] FS-Cache: Netfs 'nfs' registered for caching
[ 50.344078] Installing knfsd (copyright (C) 1996 okir@monad.swb.de).
[ 51.839284] NFSD: Using /var/lib/nfs/v4recovery as the NFSv4 state recovery directory
[ 51.857909] NFSD: starting 90-second grace period (net ffffffff81e926c0)
# dosfsck /dev/fd0
fsck.fat 3.0.22 (2013-07-19)
open: No such device or address
Maybe if I try another half dozen computers I can find one with a floppy drive that I can hear trying to work, but for now it’s past bedtime…
It could be that the old interface isn’t supported any more. A cheap USB floppy drive might be the best option.
Looks like floppy device module simply doesn’t auto-load:
# inxi -S
System:
Host: gx28b Kernel: 6.9.9-1-default arch: i686 bits: 32
Console: pty pts/4 Distro: openSUSE Tumbleweed 20240718
# ls -gGlh /dev/fd*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 13 Jul 19 10:22 /dev/fd -> /proc/self/fd
# dmesg | tail -1
[ 408.664265] [ T1403] Code: 00 00 21 c2 74 24 7a 17 38 30 0f 84 9f 00 00 00 40 38 30 0f 84 96 00 00 00 40 83 f2 02 74 0b 38 30 0f 84 88 00 00 00 40 31 d2 <8b> 08 83 c0 04 29 ca 81 c1 ff fe fe fe 4a 73 58 31 ca 81 e2 00 01
FreeDOS floppy inserted here
# dmesg | tail -3
[ 387.493691] [ T1339] Code: 00 00 21 c2 74 24 7a 17 38 30 0f 84 9f 00 00 00 40 38 30 0f 84 96 00 00 00 40 83 f2 02 74 0b 38 30 0f 84 88 00 00 00 40 31 d2 <8b> 08 83 c0 04 29 ca 81 c1 ff fe fe fe 4a 73 58 31 ca 81 e2 00 01
[ 408.664230] [ T1403] eglinfo[1403]: segfault at 0 ip b7d451e1 sp bfa103cc error 4 in libc.so.6[b7cad000+183000] likely on CPU 0 (core 0, socket 0)
[ 408.664265] [ T1403] Code: 00 00 21 c2 74 24 7a 17 38 30 0f 84 9f 00 00 00 40 38 30 0f 84 96 00 00 00 40 83 f2 02 74 0b 38 30 0f 84 88 00 00 00 40 31 d2 <8b> 08 83 c0 04 29 ca 81 c1 ff fe fe fe 4a 73 58 31 ca 81 e2 00 01
# modprobe floppy
# dmesg | tail -3
[ 408.664265] [ T1403] Code: 00 00 21 c2 74 24 7a 17 38 30 0f 84 9f 00 00 00 40 38 30 0f 84 96 00 00 00 40 83 f2 02 74 0b 38 30 0f 84 88 00 00 00 40 31 d2 <8b> 08 83 c0 04 29 ca 81 c1 ff fe fe fe 4a 73 58 31 ca 81 e2 00 01
[ 756.530227] [ T1546] Floppy drive(s): fd0 is 1.44M
[ 756.549060] [ T1546] FDC 0 is a post-1991 82077
# ls -gGlh /dev/fd*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 13 Jul 19 10:22 /dev/fd -> /proc/self/fd
brw-rw---- 1 2, 0 Jul 19 14:34 /dev/fd0
# mount -t auto /dev/fd0 /mnt
mount: /mnt: WARNING: source write-protected, mounted read-only.
# ls -gGlh /mnt
total 219K
-rwxrwxr-x 1 68 Mar 11 2000 AUTOEXEC.BAT
-rwxrwxr-x 1 66K Jan 7 1999 COMMAND.COM
-rwxrwxr-x 1 174 Mar 11 2000 CONFIG.SYS
-rwxrwxr-x 1 22K Jan 7 1999 COUNTRY.SYS
-rwxrwxr-x 1 30K Sep 30 1997 DLBA.EXE
-rwxrwxr-x 1 15K Jan 7 1999 HIMEM.SYS
-r-xr-xr-x 1 25K Jan 7 1999 IBMBIO.COM
-r-xr-xr-x 1 31K Jan 7 1999 IBMDOS.COM
-rwxrwxr-x 1 12K Jan 7 1999 KEYB.COM
-rwxrwxr-x 1 20K Jan 7 1999 SETVER.EXE
#
1 Like
I have just plugged in a Sony USB floppy drive from many years ago and everything works fine - a query whether to mount the device, a display of the disk contents and then, when I click on the Eject button, it unmounts.
This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.