Ubuntu – How to get a USB floppy drive to work

automountfloppyusb

I have a Toshiba USB floppy drive that I need to use under Ubuntu. When I connect it, and insert a floppy disk in it, I do not see anything mounted under Ubuntu 10.10.

I was suspecting the hardware and/or the floppy disk to be defective, and so I tested the floppy disk as well as the floppy drive itself under Windows XP, and everything was just fine.

I was able to find the following instructions:

  • Add the following line to the /etc/modules file:

    floppy

  • Enter the following shell commands:

    mkdir /media/floppy
    mount -t vfat /dev/sdc /media/floppy -o uid=1000

This will mount the floppy, but I would like this to happen automatically, so when I connect the drive to the USB port, it automatically mounts the floppy.

How can I make this work? Or does Ubuntu only work with internal Floppy drives?

Best Answer

The following procedure worked instantly on Ubuntu 12.04:

REMARK:
The df command shows that /dev/sdd show that d the last assigned drive in use. I need to know this to find the next available one, which is used in the subsequent sudo mount ... command. In my case, the next drive will be /dev/sde .

You will need to determine the correct drive for your own system. For example, you might have /dev/sda, or sdb, or sdc.

So, first, to see the drive information: df

Next, run mkdir and mount :

 mkdir /mt/ee1

 sudo mount -t vfat /dev/sde /mt/ee1 -o uid=1000

For automatic execution at boot time, I normally use Perl scripts, which detect and adapt automatically and give stable names to the partitions.

I do not need this at this point of time for floppies, and therefore I didn't optimize it. Perhaps the command "mount ..." is not optimal....)

A more general but a bit primitive solution would be to create a bash/batch file with multiple lines as above with sudo... , with the several probable possible variants /dev/sd... on the specific PC.

Then there might be a call of this file in the settings of "Startup Applications". I did not test this.

In addition, this does not deal with the aspect of removing or inserting a different floppy disk. This could be done in some automatic or at least semi-automatic manner....

I do not know if the way above is optimal. I just wanted to add helpful information, after having settled my own problem with the preceding answers.

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