Floppy Drive & Floppy 1 in Computer but there is only one floppy drive in my ubuntu edgy box

this is a common occurence with some machines, it may be that your motherboard supports up to 2 floppy drives, and have been named like that, I myself have 'floppy' and 'floppy0', and only 'floppy' works.

Some older drives and ports are not constantly powered, and so ubuntu may not know if there is something on the drive/port or not. A good example of this is a CD drive. Most CD drives emit a little flash every now and then, just to show they are powered and working, floppy drives only come on and 'speak' to the OS when summond to do so.

If it really bothers you, you can remove the link in /media with root. I doubt this will cause any trouble.

I dont know what the 36.5G is about though.... I have the same problem but with 38G

Hope this helps

Thanks for the info Sam..
My motherboard certainly does support two floppy drives although there is only one installed and plugged into it.
When you said "you can remove the link in /media with root"
What exactly would I have to do?? Being a newbie...Exact instructions would be appreciated. :)

You can remove the link to the device with root priviledges. 'sudo rm /media/floppy1'

You can verify that you are deleting a link with the command 'ls -l' and look for "floppy1 -> /dev/floppy1". You can always recreate the link with the command 'ln -s /dev/floppy1 /media/floppy1'

ubuntu@ubuntu-desktop:~$ sudo rm
rm: missing operand
Try `rm --help' for more information.
ubuntu@ubuntu-desktop:~$ /media/floppy1

This what I get after I copied and pasted the command in...

oh, sorry, i should have been clearer :P

paste this...

sudo rm /media/floppy1

Hi Sam, Pasted that command into terminal but this was the result...

ubuntu@ubuntu-desktop:~$ sudo rm /media/floppy1
rm: cannot remove `/media/floppy1': No such file or directory
ubuntu@ubuntu-desktop:~$

If I double click through computer..file system...media all that's in there floppy wise is floppy with what looks like a shortcut arrow around it and floppy 0 without an arrow...Now in computer I have floppy 1 and floppy drive..... Confused.. should I be? :-s
Thanks for your help so far Sam....

hmm, troublesome..... can you run this command and post the output

ls -l /media

may help a bit more

(your welcome to the help :P)

Hi... Bearing in mind I had decided to mess about in the media folder and delete the two floppy entries that were there... after your last reply and this may have messed up your Is -I /media reply.

ubuntu@ubuntu-desktop:~$ ls -l /media
total 8
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 6 2007-03-25 19:04 cdrom -> cdrom0
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2007-03-25 19:04 cdrom0
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2007-03-25 19:04 cdrom1
ubuntu@ubuntu-desktop:~$

Hope this helps...... ;-)

erm that was a bit silly of you, now you may not be able to access the real floppy at all

Try clicking on a remaining link anywhere, like a File Manager, or a Desktop shortcut

The /media folder has directories that are automatically created when devices are mounted. You can see this when you plug a USB mass storage device in. The program "pmount" mounts the removable device after making a directory under /media. Floppy and CDROM drives are an exception, with their folders being there whether there is media in the device or not, because the device is there anyway. (Note: my laptop has no floppy drive so there is no /media/floppy, another laptop has a floppy drive and so has /media/floppy although I have never used it).

The reason for it showing 36GB disk space is that when there is no media in the floppy drive the folder /media/floppy is just a folder on your hard disk, and as such reports free space of your hard disk.

The /media/floppy on my machine is just a link to /media/floppy-0 as a convenience. You can re-create them:-

sudo mkdir /media/floppy0
sudo ln -s /media/floppy0 /media/floppy

Also take a look in the file /etc/fstab and make sure there is a line that mentions /media/floppy0 as the mount point for floppy disks.

My Floppy Disk drive is totally not functioning.I am running Intrepid on an DELL INSPIRON 5000 (a 2000 model) and i have no floppy drive being recognized.Please Help me.. on this item.