Still can't read floppies

English Virtualization
1

I’m using OpenSUSE 13.1 with VirtualBox 4.2.28. I added the extension pack. I’ve installed a Windows XP Pro guest, and I can tell there are floppies, and I’ve told the guest to use fd0.

In Windows explorer I can see the device as 3 1/2 Floppy A:, but I can’t see anything on the floppy.

It’s probably because I can also see what’s on the floppy when I’m in Linux, so that must mean the floppy is being mounted in Linux host.

How do I change this so I can actually read the floppy when in guest?

Thanks, Bob

2

Is there an icon at the bottom for it? I don’t have a floppy, but to access the DVD drive, there’s a disk icon. Right clicking it shows a checkbox to select / unselect it. Might be something like that to see it?

3

All that seems OK. I can see the floppy symbol in the area you mention. It just keeps telling me to put in a floppy and can’t tell there’s already one in it.

Bob

4

So, maybe you have to unmount it on the Linux host first, so that the guest then has the necessary access perhaps?

5

As Deano describes, typically you need to unmount a drive before it can be accessed by a Guest VM (or HostOS going the other way).
I haven’t played around with floppies much, but keep in mind also that Floppy technology was in 2 sizes, IIRC 1.44MB and 2.44MB (or something like that).

BTW - You may want to ensure preservation of your data by creating floppy disk image files(similar to optical disk ISO) to use instead of accessing the physical disks directly. If you this, you may or may not need to mount the file using VBos.

TSU

6

I’ve tried to unmount the floppies (Configure Desktop, Hardware, Removable Devices, untick mount removable devices) but it doesn’t seem to make any difference. I have the floppy set to 1.44 MB, which is what I’m using. Actually as I remember, floppies came in a lot more than 2 sizes, starting with 2 in 8 in, 3 in 5 1/4 in, and 3 in 3.5 in.

7

You can always unmount the floppy manually with the ‘umount’ command. If you want to completely disable udev/udisks mounting (the behaviour is configured by rules in /llb/udev/rules.d/80-udisks2.rules), then create custom rules in /etc/udev/rules.d/ eg 50-disable-floppy-mounting.rules

# PC floppy drives
#
KERNEL=="fd*", ENV{ID_DRIVE_FLOPPY}="0", OPTIONS+="last_rule"

# USB floppy drives
#
SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", ATTRS{bInterfaceClass}=="08", ATTRS{bInterfaceSubClass}=="04", ENV{ID_DRIVE_FLOPPY}="0", OPTIONS+="last_rule"

See how that goes.

As Tsu mentioned, you could consider protecting your physical floppy media by creating images instead. Just to give you one idea about doing that

http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Qemu_transfer_files_between_host_and_guest_via_the_floppy_drive

8

I discovered today by making the floppy in guest correspond to a virtual drive I was actually able to read the floppy drive while in guest. As soon as I tried to sswap the floppy for the next one, the was a message that kept asking me to insert a floppy even though there was already one in the drive.

I suspect that I’ve been conflating a separate problem where the guest can’t read the change line from the floppy. Any comments?