[ale] intermittent access to floppy

[Lisa Chiang]

I have a laptop with Linux running on it.  The kernel is 4.1 although most
of the packages as from 4.0 RedHat.  Anyway, my problem predates 4.1.

I have intermittent access to my floppy drive (31/2, HD).  I have the
following lines in my configuration files:

 /etc/fstab:

/dev/fd0  /mnt/floppy  msdos  rw,noauto,user 0 0

/etc/mtools.conf:

drive a:
   file="dev/fd0H1440" exclusive
   fat_bits=12
   tracks=80 heads=2  sectors=18
mtools_lower_case=1


mtools usually gives me the following error:

Bad media type, probably non-MSDOS disk
Bad FAT for drive A, trying secondary copy
Could not read FAT for A
Cannot initialize 'A:'

If I try mounting it manually with "mount /dev/fd0",  I usually get an
error about bad superblocks or too many file systems mounted.  I don't
think I do.  How many is too many?

This floppy drive always works under MSDOS/Windows95.  Sometimes, but
usually very seldom under Linux.  Any suggestions?  Thanks.


Lisa Chiang
gt6492d at gatech.campus.mci.net
gt6492d at prism.gatech.edu