USB Floppy

[Matt Graham]

From: "Eric - A" <ericallen3 at juno.com>
> I got a laptop and installed ubuntu 10. All is fine except the fact
> that it did not come with a floppy drive

Since reasonably fast Net and USB drives are common now, the floppy is
obsolete.  Good riddance.  But read on.

> I have an external mitsumi usb floppy. The *computer* sees it in
> the listings but I do not get a screen icon that it is mounted
> nor can I mount it from *terminal*. I tried to do it like I did
> in Fedora to no avail.

USB floppy drives show up as SCSI disks.  It'd be /dev/sdN if usb-storage has
been loaded.  If you've got all the relevant USB modules loaded, right after
you plug the USB drive in, you should see something about which device node it
is in the output from "dmesg | tail -n30".

> lsusb sees it, but can't mount it. Any ideas?

lsusb displays bus, device, and ID, not which device node a mass storage
device is assigned to.  If the device is seen in lsusb's output, the USB
subsystem is probably working right.  Once the device is plugged in and it's
been given a few seconds to settle, take a look at the output of "ls
/dev/disk/by-id/" .  You should see the USB floppy in there somewhere if udev
is running (it should be on Ubuntu.)  Then you can use that device link in
/etc/fstab to make mounting the floppy easier.

The last time I looked at this a few years back, it was a PITA to do a
low-level format on USB floppy disks, and you couldn't use non-standard
low-level formats on those drives at all.

-- 
Matt G / Dances With Crows
The Crow202 Blog:  http://crow202.org/wordpress/
There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see