[Leaplist] Floppy problem in Lenny - Debian-Cecil

[Whit Hansell]

Well, this is getting to be really fun.  I've downloaded Knoppix 5.1 and 
it verifies w. the md5 code.  I have tried to put in on a cd 6 or 7 
times.  The first time I did it, it said it could not find the knoppix 
operating system when it booted up.  So I rebooted and hit F2 and it 
came up just fine.  But as it was checking out hdw on the run up it did 
not mention fd0, floppy or anything like that.  But it did come up and 
put a floppy icon on the desktop so I put in a DOS formatted floppy and 
hit the icon and it came up that it could not determine the filesystem.  
Same old thing again.  So I went to terminal and tried to do a mount -t 
msdos /dev/fd0 /media/floppy0 and it came up that it could not access 
the drive again.  I don't remember the exact message there but it said 
to do the dmesg | tail check again and so I did and it came up w. could 
not find filesystem again.  Well, shoot.  It was a 2.6.19 kernel image 
and so I wondered if the cd was hosed so I rebooted and did a knoppix 
test to see if there were any errors on the cd.   Tons showed up and 
after that I could not get it to load again so I tossed it and have 
tried to make more using verify on K3b and no joy.  It gets to the 
verify and says there are no tracks to verify.   I have also tried to 
make them straight across w/o verification and when I try them out it 
comes up that it can't find the operating system after it has done it's 
hdware checks, again w/o a floppy showing up on the hardware list each 
time.  And I've not been able to get it to come up since using the 
current 5.1 .iso.  I tried an older 3.4 Knoppix and it came up fine but 
when I tried to format or mount a floppy, same old stuff.  On this one 
the format just hung and the mount said the mount point was not 
accurate.  So I checked the mount point in fstab and used that one and 
it said the link went nowhere.  I checked the actual link and they were 
right.  It went to a file /mount/auto/floppy.  Well, it almost all 
existed.  There was a mount/auto but no floppy.  I'm getting really 
exasperated now.  I popped in an old Ubuntu Live CD and it just wasn't 
even set up to mess w. it as far as I could see.  Kfloppy formatter was 
in the menu list so I tried that w. no joy.  It came up w. an error 
message which basically stated it could not find something.  I figured 
if it couldn't find it it wasn't there and I wasn't going to go hunting 
for it either and gave up on that.  I don't remember what it was and by 
that time I really didn't care.   I  just think God does not want me to 
have a working floppy on this box using Linux.  What else can I think?

So, anyway, I think I'm going to reformat that other drive w. Lenny and 
see if it comes up w. the floppy available or not.  I've done more 
installations of Debian using the netinstall, I'm getting used to it by  
now.  I jsust hate ot have to re-set up the other drive w. all the stuff 
I've got on this box.  Oh well.  Right now I'm going to go fix dinner 
and get back to this in a little while.

Thanks everyone, again.
Whit




Whit Hansell wrote:
> Hmmmm....
> Not yet.   I'll try it now.  I don't have the latest Knoppix yet but 
> am on my way.
>
> Thanks.
> Whit
>
> Cecil Hornbaker wrote:
>> Whit,
>>
>> Have you tried booting with a recent debian based live cd (knoppix,
>> ubuntu, etc) to see if it can access the drive?  This is a technique
>> I've used to troubleshoot X Window configuration problems.
>>
>> Cecil
>>
<snip>