I am running Kububtu 8/4 LTS with no problems in adding for example
a new HD or indeed finding the floppy drive.

Using the KDE menu System! Settings/Advanced/Disk & Filesystems, and
then logging in as admin allows all sorts of interesting fun to be
had like adding drives etc.

Not had to format any floppies yet so that might be a bit of a
challenge, but as I have hundreds of unused floppies hanging about
here that's not really critical. I assume that the Gnome menu system
has a somewhat similar "settings" menu.

Have hardly had to access the command line at all on this [Office]
machine. Superb distro.