Floppy trouble

[greyris]

Ok, now don't shoot me or flame me until you finish reading! For the most part I know what I'm doing, I've been running Slack on my home machine and my machine at work for about 6 months now, and just ran into a slight snag.

I'm trying to mount a floppy, and it keeps giving me different errors. I've tried mounting the drive several different ways with the mount command. I've moutned disks at work just fine, but having trouble at home (I also did a forum search, but that didn't tell me anything I haven't tried). I've tried doing:

mount /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy
mount -t msdos /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy
mount -t vfat /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy
mount -t auto /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy

and the same as above but with /dev/fd0h1440. I've tried a few different dos and win disks, all with no success.

The first line gives me Input/Output errors then craps out. The other lines give me:

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/fd0h1440,
or too many mounted file systems

I've got to be overlooking something really dumb, but I don't know what.. any help would be appreciated. If it helps, I'm using Slack 7.

Thanks,

Mike

[pbharris]

hi,
if this a msdos floppy try using mtools, no need to mount anything.
but you should be able to mount stuff! so do a fsck.msdos on it, that shiuld tell you how the file system is. that is about all i cna suggest, i have had this happen to me too, but I can't remember how I got around it...

[greyris]

No dice. I got mtools to work once, and later when I tried to mount the drive mtools stopped working. I've shutdown and rebooted, but still doesn't work. It says "Cannot initialize 'A:'" with any of the mtools commands.

If I let it auto-detect the fs, i get an Input/Output Error and it tells me to specify a fs (after waiting for about a minute). If I use -t <fs type> it barfs with the error I mentioned earlier.

grr.. normally this isn't an issue as I rarely use floppies, but I'm trying to install Win4Lin and need to use a win boot disk. *sigh* Anyone have any other ideas? Thanks for the help..

-Mike