Re: [Sheflug] Re: Floppy Problem

[lesleyb <lesley.binks [at] xxxxxxxxx>]

Alec Melling wrote:
> Knowing that the wheels of this list grind exceedingly slowly these days. It 
> was suggested to me to try editing fstab and putting a return in at the end 
> of the last line.
Ridiculously slowly

I have just received this today.

Right ... if I recall correctly there are two files of interest, 
/etc/mtab for all your mounted thingies

/etc/fstab for all the filesystems you are likely to want to mount.

The man pages are pretty good on fstab.
My SuSE /etc/fstab certainly doesn't have a newline after the /dev/fd0 
on the last line and I'm wondering if this is why I get a segmentation 
fault when I try to mount the floppy drive.

This is my last line in my SuSE /etc/fstab

> /dev/fd0             /media/floppy        subfs      fs=floppyfss,procuid,nodev,nosuid,sync 0 0
I've pasted it as a quotation to avoid line wrap.

I had started a Debian install on my laptop today and while I can't cut 
and paste to prove it, I can confirm the /dev/fd0 data line there is
the same.

I can also confirm that neither file has a newline after the /dev/fd0.
> Of course this worked, but I still don't know why this would be important?
>
> Secondly I am now getting an error message that reads:
>
> 'Mount: I could not determine the filesystem type, and none was specified'
/dev/fd0        /media/floppy0  auto    rw,user,noauto  0       0

/dev/fd0 is the device to be mounted
/media/floppy0 is the mount point - basically where you are going to get 
to it from
auto - specifies the file system type.  If you type in 'man 5 fstab' and 
page down you will see that you can have a number if different 
filesystem types and you are recommended to look at the mount command 
'man 8 mount' to make more sense of the ones they list.  This is where 
you need to start looking for why you get that message.

rw,user,noauto - means mount it rw, let users mount it but don't do it 
automatically.

The two trailing zeroes mean don't dump this device, and don't bother to 
fsck it at boot time.

Now 'man 8 mount' says "The standard form of the mount command is '
mount -t type device dir

so for the floppy I guess you are typing

mount /dev/fd0

or

mount /dev/fd0 /media/floppy0

In my experience the first of these has nearly always been sufficient.


You could try a formatted floppy with some data already on it rather 
than a completely clean floppy.

Mount will try to guess when it encounters an auto filesystem type 
taking info from the superblock; /etc/filesystems or /proc/filesystems 
or using the blkid library to guess.  This info is from 'man 8 mount'

Given how slow this list is I suggest you try the Ubuntu or Kubuntu 
forums and/or linuxquestions.org.  The search facilities on these sites 
are pretty good.

HTH

Lesley
> Any ideas as to what is going on here?
>
> Cheers
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