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[SOLVED] Error accessing floppy in Debian Stretch

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Snake
Posts: 38
Joined: 2015-04-19 01:16
Location: Virginia US

[SOLVED] Error accessing floppy in Debian Stretch

#1 Post by Snake »

I'm running Debian Stretch on my desktop that has an internal desktop floppy drive. Yeah, I still use floppies, I love them.

I'm running into this error while trying to access my floppies with Nautilus in GNOME 3 (I took a screenshot and cropped the error message):
Image

Here's the output of "lsmod | grep "floppy""

Code: Select all

eric@THEMASTER:~$ lsmod | grep "floppy"
floppy                 69632  0
eric@THEMASTER:~$ 
So I know the kernel module is getting loaded, but I don't really understand that error. The block device /dev/fd0 is present but for some reason isn't valid.
Does anyone know how to fix this? I would highly appreciate it.

The command "sudo mount /dev/fd0 /media/floppy" (or wherever I mount it at) shows the same error about the block device. I also tried using "udisks --mount /dev/fd0" but got a command unavailable message. The udisks command isn't available in Stretch I'm assuming?
I made sure that I'm in the floppy group but still no dice.

I did some Googling and found one way to fix it is to downgrade udisks but I really don't want to do that. I'm picky about my stuff being up to date.

Thanks for your time and I hope I can fix this. If you need any more info, just ask.
Last edited by Snake on 2017-08-31 19:41, edited 1 time in total.

Snake
Posts: 38
Joined: 2015-04-19 01:16
Location: Virginia US

Re: Error accessing floppy in Debian Stretch

#2 Post by Snake »

UPDATE:

I fixed it by typing in the command "sudo modprobe floppy" into the terminal. Now I can mount my floppies and format them. Which I found odd considering that the floppy module was already loaded, which is why I didn't do that to begin with. But then again, I don't really know everything yet.

I do have two more questions though:

Will I have to type that command in every time I restart my desktop and if so how can I automate it? Kernel parameter perhaps? : FIXED! I added a floppy.conf file to /etc/modules-load.d with the word floppy in it to load the module at boot. It worked. Now I just gotta figure out how to write to it as a normal user.

I'm not able to write to the floppy using my normal user account, I have to be root to write to it. Is there a way to write to it as a normal user? I have already added myself to the floppy group. I DO plan on formatting them as ext2 soon, after I do that, I will still want to be able to write to them as a normal user. Is that possible?

Thanks.

bigrigdriver
Posts: 145
Joined: 2014-09-01 17:04
Location: East Central Illinois, USA

Re: Error accessing floppy in Debian Stretch

#3 Post by bigrigdriver »

Edit /etc/fstab to show something like this for your floppy entry:
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy0 auto rw,user,noauto,exec,utf8,uid=<my user id> 0 0

Replace <my user id> with your user ID. Then reboot and try it.
Registered GNU/Linux user #170078

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Snake
Posts: 38
Joined: 2015-04-19 01:16
Location: Virginia US

Re: Error accessing floppy in Debian Stretch

#4 Post by Snake »

bigrigdriver wrote:Edit /etc/fstab to show something like this for your floppy entry:
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy0 auto rw,user,noauto,exec,utf8,uid=<my user id> 0 0

Replace <my user id> with your user ID. Then reboot and try it.
Thanks but I got it working. I just forgot to mark this as solved. Since I had my floppies formatted as EXT2, the uid option wouldn't work, it wouldn't mount the floppies with that option. Which sucked because it worked great when my floppies were formatted as vfat.

I have my floppies mounted to /media/eric/floppy automatically by Gnome Disks from the entry in fstab , I had to mount each floppy individually and run this command for each floppy:

Code: Select all

sudo chown eric:eric /media/eric/floppy
for it to be writeable by me.

It works great now. I'm going to go ahead and mark this as solved. Thanks for the help.

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