Cannot mount or format floppies

[bpoi]

I've searched through the forums, but I'm still stuck getting a floppy drive to work. Yes, I combiled floppy support into the kernel.

First, /dev/fd0 did not exist, so I did

mknod /dev/fd0 b 2 0

Apparently, that worked, so I put in a new floppy disk and tried formatting it:

fdformat /dev/fd0H1440

which works fine on an older Redhat machine I have. Here is the error message:

/dev/fd0: Read-only file system

Okay, so I format a floppy on my other machine, run -mke2fs- on it, and copy a small file. I verify the disk is fine on that machine. Now I come back to my Gentoo machine:

bash-2.05b# mount -t ext2 /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy/
mount: block device /dev/fd0 is write-protected, mounting read-only
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/fd0,
or too many mounted file systems

I'm out of guesses... Any clues?

[bpoi]

Figured out the problem ... After I rebooted the machine and stuck a floppy in the drive during startup, it worked okay.

[FastTurtle]

Most likely the reason you had a problem was the fact the /dev doesn't get updated until a reboot.

What I've found to work is use the existing /dev/fd0u1440 and create an fstab listing that looks like this

/dev/fd0u1440 /mnt/floppy msdos users 0 0 and things work fine. I can now mount, format, read and write floppies and share them with Windows machines. Now all I have to do is figure out how to read/write MAC formated disks.