[Leaplist] Floppy problem in Lenny - Debian

[Whit Hansell]

Hey guys,
I'm kerstukin.  I'm running Lenny(testing) on an AMD Sempron box and 
cannot get my floppy to work at all.  I have, on the same box, another 
drive w. WXP on it and the floppy works just fine.  The floppy is 
recognized in the BIOS as a 1.44   3.5", which it is.

The main statement I get is that the filesystem can't be found when I 
use the KDE floppy icon which I think is kfloppy.  And I have mtools 
installed and it just tells me it is not a DOS floppy and needs to be 
formatted first.  I've tried to format it using the kfloppy icon and 
after it goes thru all the formatting and tries to close and finalize 
the format it gives me an error stating that a fatal error occurred and 
that the format failed.  I've gone CL and used mount -t [msdos or vfat 
or auto] at various times w. /dev/fd0 /media/floppy0 - one or the other 
and both and they have all failed.  Error: mount: /dev/fd0 is not a 
valid block device

My original fstab statement was/is:

 /dev/fd0        /media/floppy0  auto    rw,user,noauto  0       0

I added the same lines just for grins w. msdos and one for ext3, too.  
But no joy.  It makes no difference.  I also added an etc/filesystems 
file w. msdos, vfat and a whole bunch of other filesystem types too but 
that didn't help either.

In the /media directory, I have both floppy and floppy0, but floppy0 is 
what was set up in fstab so have not extensively tested floppy, yet.  
But have done mount requests a couple of times using it instead of 
floppy0 and it still didn't work.  The error w. the mount command was 
again:  mount: /dev/fd0 is not a valid block device

lsmod shows:
floppy                 52004  0

It seems like it can't find the first sector of any of the floppies I 
use and I have used a bunch of 'em.  I have swapped out three different 
floppy drives too and it makes no difference.

I've googled and dogpiled and checked forums and everything I can think 
of and have not found the answer to this problem.  I am having it also 
on another machine w. sarge on it but have not done the extensive 
testing on it that I have on this one.  dmesg recognized it as a 1.44 
floppy and then there is another line which says it is a post 1991? 
drive and gives some number like 82077 or something like that.  I don't 
remember but it doesn't say anything about loading the driver that I can 
see but don't know if it is supposed to.

Anyway, if anyone has found this problem and fixed it or has any good 
ideas please let me know.  I have a digital camera, a Sony Mavica which 
uses a floppy for it's data capture/transfer and I would really like to 
be able to use it w. Linux instead of being forced to use WXP and 
emailing them to me via Yahoo or whoever.

TIA  I appreciate any help you can give.  aGain, thanks so much.  I'm 
stumped and I've spent many hours playing around and gotten nowhere.

Whit