Absent floppy support in 9.10 ?

Are you certain your floppy disk is still operational? No magnets nearby?

Absolutely - I can boot the computer from a MS-DOS floppy. But from within Ubuntu 9.10 I cannot read or mount any floppy.

I could mount and read/write to floppy under 9.04.

How recently were you able to last read/mount the disk?

Have you tried the disk on any other machines?

You will need to run:

sudo modprobe floppy

Can you give the output of:

cat /etc/fstab

We need to make sure you have the right line so it can be automounted. Floppies still rock :D

I upgraded this machine about 4 weeks ago from 9.04 to 9.10, then my stepson's machine 2 weeks ago to 9.10. Under 9.04 I could mount/read/write the floppy disk. Under 9.10 the floppy drive light comes on, the disk spins, but no mount happens and "Disk Utility" just claims there is no media.

The disk mounts on the only other machine here which still runs 9.04 (stepdaughter's machine, Dell Precision 380. I couldn't upgrade that one to 9.10 due to some problem with the graphics driver which installs with 9.10, it doesn't work at all with that machine's ATi graphics card (something GL, V3100...128 meg of video ram), just shows a black display even during a safe graphics mode install - but that's a different issue I'm angry at).

Like I said, I can boot this machine (Dell Precision 370) from the DOS floppy disk. I can read and write to and from the disk, so obviously the disk is fine, the floppy drive is fine, the motherboard is fine. It's 9.10 that's screwed up apparently when it comes to accessing the floppy.

Comment - I'm starting to have my doubts about continuing with upgrades to the OS when they are released - I'm definitely underwhelmed with 9.10 if this is the result so far. Shuttleworth's money put into this and I can't mount a floppy disk! Consider it.

You didnt give the output of the command, this will get you to where you want to go rather than ranting.

Your call.

geo@Dell1:~$ cat /etc/fstab
# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid -o value -s UUID' to print the universally unique identifier
# for a device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name
# devices that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
# / was on /dev/sda1 during installation
UUID=aa840445-5e95-4abf-ae4a-38e5f4020d75 / ext3 errors=remount-ro 0 1
# /home was on /dev/sdb1 during installation
UUID=c8120509-479a-4446-9e8f-e9e1fd5725d4 /home ext3 defaults 0 2
# /tmp was on /dev/sda7 during installation
UUID=5d9389e5-56c6-4445-a900-827ddd329eb3 /tmp ext3 defaults 0 2
# /usr was on /dev/sda8 during installation
UUID=2a2f0204-4245-400f-a9ce-871af5a4bc90 /usr ext3 defaults 0 2
# /var was on /dev/sda6 during installation
UUID=753e2404-19bc-4de6-9594-ee83f8f77565 /var ext3 defaults 0 2
# swap was on /dev/sda5 during installation
UUID=c34d798d-865e-49a2-a17f-10c79df3c80d none swap sw 0 0
/dev/scd0 /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec,utf8 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy0 auto rw,user,noauto,exec,utf8 0 0

Maybe Microsoft has a better product?

To get your floppy working in Linux, I doubt it.

http://www.ubuntugeek.com/tiphow-to-mountunmount-and-format-floppy-disk-in-ubuntu.html

May help