Writing to a floppy

[synecdoche]

I have a number of files I would like to transfer onto a floppy disk so I can take them to another computer (they are drivers for an NIC).

fstab mounts /dev/fd0 to /mnt/floppy. I can copy the files there without any errors, but nothing actually happens. The disk drive light does not come on, there is no noise, nothing happens at all. The file transfer seems to happen instantaneously.

So, to doublecheck, I ls in /mnt/floppy. All of the files are listed. So, I happily take my floppy over to the other computer, check out the disk, and there is nothing on it.

Issues: This disk is formatted for a Windows machine. However, I've transferred files in this way before, from a Linux box to the windows box (same computer, different distro).

Here is the line from my fstab about the floppy drive:

/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner,kudzu 0 0


Any ideas?

Thanks,
david

[je_fro]

Did you unmount the disk before removing it? You sure you have MS filesystem support?

[IvanPro]

from what you wrote it really seems like you didn't unmount your floppy: only when you do that the files are phisically written onto it.

[jrbishop79]

I found this out the hard way... when you save stuff to a floppy disk, in order to actually write the stuff to a disk you must unmount it . use 'umount /dev/fd0' And yes that's umount, it's not a typo.. then the motor will start turning, the light will come on and all the data will be written to the floopy disk.

[deanrantala]

1)Be sure you got msdos fs support on your kernel (if using a stock kernel, this probably is not the problem)

2)Rather than copy files like this

#cp /home/yourname/yourfile.exe /mnt/floppy

you must type it like this

#cp /home/yourname/yourfile.exe /mnt/floppy/yourfile.exe

I had the same problem you described and this fixed it.

3)Always be sure to do....

#umount /mnt/floppy
or
#umount /dev/fd0


either one works.

[synecdoche]

Thanks everyone, I have it working now.