I lost my floppy on that latest upgrade, but keep this handy if I need
to use it

go to terminal

enter sudo modprobe floppy

you might have to enter your passwor

I now know something about 'modprobe'.
I issued "sudo modprobe floppy -v" to receive verbose messages;
entered password; response was;
insmod /lib/modules/2.6.27-11-generic/kernel/drivers/block/floppy.ko
entered "fdmount"
response "fdmount () Must run with EUID=root (seemed strange)
then entered "sudo fdmount"
response was;
fdmount (/dev/fd0): Can't access /fd0: No such file or directory
End of Session
Any suggestions for my next step?

I'm not that strong on the fine points of Linux but it would appear that
your system is just not seeing the floppy. I taught computer hardware for
years and here is what I would suggest:

Look at the light on the drive. It should be on when you are trying to
access it. If not the drive may be toast!

If you have another operating system on that machine go into it and see if
it sees the floppy.

Go into the ROM BIOS and see if the floppy shows up there and is enabled as
the size it really is.

Open the case and check the cables to make sure they are tightly connected
to the floppy drive.

Most floppy drives are found on older computers these days and they don't
last forever, even if they are seldom used. As a last resort try swapping it
for a known good one from another machine. If that solves the problem then
either buy a new floppy (probably less than $20) or just leave it there to
fill the hole and resolve not to use it. A CD is cheap enough that you can
burn anything you need onto one and use it instead where necessary.

I have sequentially up-graded to 8.10 and I didn't notice fd0 was gone
until after the most recent upgrade although it was there while I was
operating 8.04.

How do I get fd0 back? Bios knows it is there and I can boot into DOS
using a floppy boot disk.

I have also looked into the case and inspected power and data cables,
AOK.

Linux obviously can't find the drive to mount it.

I have many uses for a working floppy drive including lots of photos
and other data. It worked once and I want to restore it. If
necessary I can borrow a drive from another computer but I really
don't think it is a bad drive, although it is not a TEAC which is the
brand with which I have most experience.

I'm really intrigued by this problem and look forward to when you post
your "eureka" moment and how you did it!

I don't know what prompted the response below to a problem I had just 4 months
ago. The problem was solved, sort of, as described in messages 13699 and my
response 13702.

For the present, I have upgraded to 9.04 and my floppy was preserved as in the
past. I suspect my problem was caused by 8.10.

I have not been trying to format any floppies so can't report my progress in
that area.

Thanks again for those who gave me their advice.

Never lost a floppy but I lost a hard drive once.
Turned up in another case where I'd installed it
but forgot. (You might check your other boxes :-)

Thanks for your suggestion, but it went right past me.

What means"You might check your other boxes"?

Did you ever get Ubuntu 8.10 to find your floppy? I just
installed 8.10 and 8.10 acts like it doesn't exist. I can access it
from XP in another partition so it does exist. I have tried all the
ideas others have given you but to no avail. Maybe this is a bug and
should be reported?

I think "You might check your other boxes" means look and see if the missing
drive was transplanted into another computer case and then forgotten.

However, I was surprised to find that my Ubuntu 8.04 and 8.10 machines do
not find the floppy drive! My Linux Mint 6 (Felicia) does find the floppy
drive and read the diskettes. I had not noticed before as I almost never
have reason to use floppies, which are pretty much obsolete anyway. Flash
drives are faster, much higher capacity and cheap - I remember paying over
$40 for a box of 10 5 1/4" single sided diskettes.

No luck so-far. Nobody seems to want to tackle this one, and I am
still flailing away.

It probably is a bug in the distribution and I would report it if I
knew how.

Sorry to hear you are having the same problem. I am wondering if I
should just cash-in Ubuntu and try Suse which has been recommended to
me by friends.

Have you searched ubuntuforums.org?

I havent had a floppy drive in years - and no linux machine I have
worked on has ever had a floppy - but I have only been putting ubuntu in
businesses and schools for about three years.

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.

With the alternatives that do what we used to depend on
floppies for, i.e., transfer data (CD ROM disks now so
cheap, USB solid state memory) the only thing I can think
for them to be necessary for is booting thin clients on
old machines without mainboard network connectors -- and
there are other ways to do that without a floppy, as well.

What do you exactly mean by "floppy drive is lost" ?

Did You mount the floppy in order to see it ?
(sudo mount /media/floppy , the floppy should be /dev/fd0)

By the way you should have an entry in /etc/fstab that shows the
floppy device and it's mount point.

Is it just that the distro doesn't see the floppy device at all ?
(Check output of sudo lshw, do you see a floppy controller ?)

In that case is may just that you have to find out about what driver
should be loaded for your hardware.

We need more info. I had a thinkpad with a floppy in a bay, I could
switch between the CD reader and the floppy. On all machines I had
with a floppy : it worked. So I'm kind of puzzled why yours wouldn't ???

In Ubuntu open a terminal and type

"sudo gedit /etc/modules"

without the quotation marks. A file should open looking something like
the attached file
at the end of the file and on a new line add

Your suggestion was exactly what I needed. after adding "floppy" to
/etc/modules, My Floppy drive reappeared in Nautilus just as it had
previously. I was able to mount and read floppies just as I should,
however I still can't format a disc.

I have been advised that I should 'right-click' the icon on the
desktop and select "format" but that is not an available choice,
neither in active or grayed form.

I have not been able to sort out the correct commands for "fdformat"
and although "Synaptic" tells me that "gnome-utils" is installed, I
can't execute it nor can I find any information neither in "man" nor
using 'on-line help'.

I am beginning to believe that my installation is crippled in some way.

Again thanks to Joe, and thanks too to those of you who suggested
things which I had already tried, and thanks even to those of you who
suggested I should just give up, a practical alternative to some, but
just withdrawing support for some hardware or software that people are
productively using is just "so Microsoft".

There is a generic command to format drives but you need to specify
some parameters. As soon as i get the chance i will look into it and see
what there is

Make sure the floppy in unmounted and then open a terminal window and type

"sudo gfloppy"

without the quotation marks. This should open a window with a formatting
program for all types of floppy disks

I was able to mount and read floppies just as I should,
however I still can't format a disc.

There are utilities that you can install in Synaptic such as kfloppy (KDE),
kmformat (KDE), gnome-utils (includes gfloppy), and fdutils. Apparently you can
right click on the floppy icon when you go to Places, Computer, but I can't
confirm this as I have no floppy drive.

Oops, I was being facetious... s'what I get trying
to be funny.


Box is another term for the case in which the computer
is assembled, as in, "I'm running Linux in this box
but I'm stuck with XP in the other one because of
a special app I can't do without. Hmmm...what's this
about VM?"

I really did misplace a hard disk once -- looked all
over, every drawer and every box full of electronic
stuff -- started wondering if anyone might have
snitched it, thinking the worst about someone.

There it turned up finally, in another computer as
a storage drive. I'd been hit with the C-nile virus.

You can often find a better match by trying a different distro. That is because
there is enough of a difference between the distros to make them vary from mild
to significant and they often have different target groups.

OpenSUSE is not a newbie distro IMO. It tries to be but utterly fails. First
off, it uses RPM which is getting better, but SUSE's implementation of it is not
as good as Fedora or Mandriva. They have dialogues that pop up to help resolve
dependency issues which are more common in RPM than in DEB, used by Debian based
distros such as Ubuntu. These dialogues can and often do make the situation
worse instead of better, making the system unstable and sometimes unusable,
depending on how much you have installed. If you stick to their installed
packages it has lots of things going for it. However, as you go beyond that it
can be daunting for a newbie, IMO.

A better choice for an RPM distro would be Mandriva or PCLinuxOs which is based
on Mandriva. These have their own unique sets of problems, but they are better
for someone not experienced in Linux, than either SUSE or Fedora.

Another distro to try would be SimplyMEPIS which is still in the Debian camp
(not RPM based) and it has more tools than Ubuntu, similar in this respect to
Mint which is based on Ubuntu, but has more tools.

Debian itself has also just released Debian 5. It is worth a try, but it is not
a user friendly as even Ubuntu, let alone some of the other user friendly ones
mentioned.

Each distro is different, just as each user is. Depending on the way you work
and your hardware configuration, you may find a better match with another
distro, or not.

Be careful what you wish for. Ubuntu is easy compared to many distros.

Simply Mepis is also uses the Ubuntu repositories, so in a sense you
could say it is a Ubuntu based distro.

SimplyMEPIS used to be based on Ubuntu, but only for one release, MEPIS 6. It
lasted only for Feisty. When Gutsy came out MEPIS 6.5 had reverted to Debian,
Lenny as its core.

The thinking at the time was that Debian was too hard to maintain because they
had no clear release cycle, but they found that many users became confused with
Ubuntu's repositories and they ran into difficulties as some MEPIS functionality
suffered when people got carried away. Also they found Ubuntu's six month cycle
too hard for a little distro to keep up with. There was just enough different
that made it hard to manage. MEPIS does not use sudo for example. It has root
logins. It has many of its own utilities.

It is solidly Debian now and MEPIS 8 looks and works great. I was a MEPIS user
for two years before Feisty came out.

You are right about the website, but it is old information and has not been
updated. I lived through the changes and have MEPIS 8 installed, so I know the
repos well. MEPIS is a one person operation and Warren was ill through this
period, so perhaps it was not a high priority. It emtions 2006, but not beyond
that.

This is the Wikipedia section on this period:

MEPIS was designed as an alternative to SUSE Linux, Red Hat Linux, and Mandriva
Linux (formerly Mandrake) which, in the creator Warren Woodford's opinion,
were too difficult for the average user. MEPIS's first official release
was on May 10, 2003.
In 2006, MEPIS made a transition from using Debian packages to using Ubuntu
packages. [1] SimplyMEPIS 6.0, released in July 2006, was the first version of
MEPIS to incorporate the Ubuntu packages and repositories.
SimplyMEPIS 7.0 discontinued the use of Ubuntu binary packages in
favor of a combination of MEPIS packaged binaries based on Debian and
Ubuntu source code, combined with a Debian Stable OS core and extra
packages from Debian package pools.[2]

If you install MEPIS all evidence of Ubuntu is gone. While it mentions Ubuntu
source code in Wikipedia, there is nothing that faintly resembles Ubuntu. So I
am not sure what they are using re: Ubuntu since Ubuntu and MEPIS have the same
original source, Debian. Debian has long complained about Ubuntu's lack of
upstream contributios, but that is no longer the case. They now contribute
upstream and this could be what the wikipedia article refers to.


I admit it is all confusing, which is one of the reasons that I moved from MEPIS
to Ubuntu in 2006.

Ok but even there in the wiki that you just sent it says "based on
Debian and Ubuntu source code..."

Doesn't make it a Ubuntu based distro, but he is still using Ubuntu
source code