Unable to mount, unmount, write to, or otherwise access floppy drive
Posts: 440
Hi all,
I have been using a test installation of Mepis 6.0 for some time (if Jon duQ and the others who were helping me last time I was here see this post, yes, once again I had to postpone the elaborate "future plans" I described in posts some months ago), and have experienced persistent problems with my internal CD drives and my floppy drive. Here I want to ask for help concerning the latter.
One change in 6.0 from older Mepis, if I recall correctly, is the new /media directory, which I take is where the floppy drive should automount when you boot up. My first question is: if I su to root in a shell, what is the syntax to try to manually mount or unmount the floppy drive? I am (or was) familiar with /mnt/ but /media/ is entirely new to me.
Second, when I log in, at present my floppy drive automounts as media:/fd0, but although I could read the directory, I was unable to write to the floppy either by dragging icons on the desktop or using cp in a shell. Then I tried mounting and umounting first using the desktop, then manually, without success. At present MEPIS apparently believes I still have a particular floppy in the drive, which is not true. (Yes, I tried to unmount it BEFORE removing it from the drive so that I could try another floppy, and yes, this particular floppy was already formatted and in fact I used it with no problems under Simply MEPIS 3.3.) Has anyone experienced problems like this? Any suggestions?
TIA, feheeszeno
where ya bin man?
Posts: 4864
feheezeno, i was wondering where you were, and googled to see if your nick had turned up on someone else's forum.
good to see you back
Don't automount the
Posts: 194
Don't automount the floppy.
Forget about that floppy icon in devices, its a bug.
Make one yourself.
1. Rightclick on an empty spot on the screen>choose new>link to device>device
Fill in : /dev/fd0
OR
2. Rightclick on an empty spot on the screen>choose new>link to URL>
URL: floppy:/a
1. long mounting time
2. cant read and write at the same time and cant open files direct from floppy
Trouble with floppies under Mepis 6.0?
Posts: 440
Hi, drlizau,
Good to be back, but remember that I'm totally paranoid, so (a) I would use different handles on any other forums (b) the notion of someone googling for my handle totally terrifies me, aiaii! Just kidding... sort of. Anyway, not to worry, I've just been distracted, plus MEPIS mostly works fine (yay!) and that's why I haven't been here for some time. And hi to Jon and all the others who have helped me (or entertained me) here in the past--- you guys constitute an invaluable resource!
Wow, yamal, I just tried the two procedures you suggested but I'm not sure they're suitable. (I should have mentioned that what I was trying to do was to put a small "checked clean" text file on a floppy and to use the floppy to transfer the file to a "backroom" machine, not connected to this one by ethernet.)
Anyway, yamal, someone, PLEASE tell me that there is a better way! Preferably a line command in the shell? Does anyone know? I prefer shell commands when things break because should even more things break (like X) I have some chance of still being able to save the day with the shell.
The good news is that this problem doesn't happen all the time, and in fact I was able to write to another floppy the other day, but something is definitely wrong because this problem does happen quite a bit. I guess I am glad in a way to know it's not just me. Is this bug fixed in the next edition of MEPIS? Not being able to write reliably to floppies seems like a pretty major bug to me.
feheeszeno
no usb?
Posts: 4864
i guess this machine in your backroom has no usb, because i haven't used a floppy in a long time - my new machine actually has a floppy drive but i haven't tested it yet.
there has to be cli way to write to floppies - they did exist long before the gui on intel machines.
What About mtools?
Posts: 5513
there has to be cli way to write to floppies - they did exist long before the gui on intel machines
What about the various "mtools"? I think they are installed by default on all Linux boxes (but I could be wrong). From a konsole, perform "whereis mtools" and "man mtools" to see if you have anything 
Jon
I'm your worst nightmare: A Geek with an Attitude!
Proud Charter Member of
Da Mepis Posse 
Problems with usb and mtools? Panicky Knoppix doubts, etc.
Posts: 440
Hi, drlizau and Jon,
drlizau, you have a point, of course the other machine has USB drives and of course I do have some inexpensive pen drives. I seem to recall that in earlier versions there were persistent problems with mounting pendrives, but I take it these were fixed by MEPIS 6.0?
Jon, I do have mtools installed, probably by default (but if not, I vaguely remember noticing mtools at the debian repos). The man pages say these allow you to manipulate floppies without mounting them (somehow scary, since I didn't know such a thing was possible--- c.f. Knoppix and other live CDs; they boot with hard drive unmounted so unless the user takes specific actions the hard drive is never touched during a knoppix session, or so I believed?).
Reading between the lines, I guess from the man page that mtools originated as a fix to some problem with unix writing to a floppy belonging to an MSDOS file system? Jon, you probably forgot, but I don't have a dual boot system with Windows and to the best of my knowledge, Microsoft software has never been installed on any of my machines (although I sadly suspect that Windows runs my SMC Barricade router, barf, which would certainly explain a certain instability compared to linux).
The mtool man page assumes the reader understands how the way in which MSDOS handles floppies differs from the way in which *nix handles floppies. Now, IIRC, MSDOS was the Microsoft OS before Windows. And I thought that the floppy format used by unix derived OS's like linux is slightly different--- in particular, in textfiles like the one I wanted to transfer, the EOL characters are not accompanied under linux by old style lineprinter CR characters, but in MSDOS they are. Hence the annoying extra characters at the end of every line when I encounter a text file written on an MSDOS machine (and no doubt a Windows machine). (Yes, I know about the nifty utility fromdos which removes them for linux users, and todos which adds them for users of Those Other Operating Systems.)
So, to reiterate my original question, can no-one at MEPIS Forums explain why MEPIS 3.3.1 -> MEPIS 6.0 changed from floppies being mounted like disks in /mnt using standard mount command to showing up in the new root subdirectory /media? Or what line commands would be used to mount and umount were it not for the "bug"? Or in which MEPIS version the floppy bug is fixed?
feheeszeno
/mnt vs /media
Posts: 5513
Hey feheeszeno
Actually the various mtools were designed to create/manipulate/delete various MS-DOS file systems, such as fat16 and fat32. The format of the floppy used by Windows is different than that used by *nix. So the mtools were made so that people who got floppies from people, or needed to send floppies to Windows people, would be able to do so.
Now the /mnt and /media mount points are not a bug. I believe it is based on a couple, relatively new, Linux standards:
The Linux Standard Base (LSB)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_standard_base
The Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem_Hierarchy_Standard
It is in the FHS that /media was defined for "removable media"; whereas /mnt is for "temporary" (but not removable) storage.
Jon
I'm your worst nightmare: A Geek with an Attitude!
Proud Charter Member of
Da Mepis Posse
Sorry, should have mentioned this:
Posts: 440
From dmesg, this is probably relevant:
attempt to access beyond end of device
fd0: rw=0, want=2884, limit=2880
Again, I used this very floppy successfully on previous occasions. The drive now appears to be "locked up" which is why I want to try to unmount and then remount it using a shell command.
feheeszeno