Ubuntu – How to use a floppy drive in Ubuntu

floppyhardwarenautilus

Same computer, under Ubuntu 8.04 no problem at all.
Under 12.04, floppy drive is non existent for Ubuntu.
Drive and floppy disquette works well on DOS.
Computer boots from the floppy W98se, no problem at all.

How I can use floppys under Ubuntu 12.04 ?.

Best Answer

  1. Check if the floppy module is loaded:

    lsmod | grep -i floppy

    This command should not return anything. If it returns "floppy" then you have the floppy module loaded and this answer does not solve your problem.

    If you want to load the floppy module:

    sudo modprobe -v floppy
lsmod | grep -i floppy

  2. Try adding your username in the floppy group:

    sudo adduser $USER floppy

  3. You could also try installing fdutils package:

    $ apt-cache show fdutils
Package: fdutils
[...]
Description-en: Linux floppy utilities
 This package contains utilities for formatting extra capacity
 disks, automatic floppy disk mounting and unmounting, etc.
 .
 The package includes the following items:
 .
  - superformat: formats high capacity disks (up to 1992k
    for high density disks or up to 3984k for extra density
     disks);
  - fdmount: automatically mounts/unmounts disks when they are
    inserted/removed;
  - xdfcopy: formats, reads and writes OS/2's XDF disks;
  - MAKEFLOPPIES: creates the floppy devices in /dev;
  - getfdprm: prints the current disk geometry (number of
    sectors, track and heads etc.);
  - setfdprm: sets the current disk geometry;
  - fdrawcmd: sends raw commands to the floppy driver;
  - floppycontrol: configures the floppy driver;
  - general documentation about the floppy driver.
 .
 Note that these utilities do not work for USB floppy drives, because
 these do not allow direct access to the floppy controller.
Homepage: http://fdutils.linux.lu/

    fdmount seems useful. Try: sudo fdmount -l

  4. Check if your floppy drive is listed here:

    nautilus computer://

  5. If you're still facing problems, post the output of the above commands, plus this:

    dmesg > dmesg.log
gedit dmesg.log

Post the content of dmesg.log to a pastebin somewhere (i.e. http://www.pastebin.com ) and give us the link.

P.S. You may be suffering from this bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/441835 -- Try:

udisks --mount /dev/fd0
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