Re: IBM R40e: external USB floppy does not work

[Daniel Pittman <daniel@rimspace.net>]

On Thu, 15 Apr 2004, Uwe Brauer wrote:
> On 14 Apr 2004, james@buffer.net wrote:
>> Uwe Brauer wrote:
>>> On 14 Apr 2004, robsims@robsims.ipf.fc.hp.com wrote:

[...]

>> It's great that the KDE community is addressing ms* floppies, but,
>> remember mtools (i.e. mcopy and mdir and mdel) allows one to iteract
>> with ms* floppies without mounting....
> 
> nope not for the external usb floppy I was asking for.
> ( mtools were my first try of course )

One thing to remember is that the 'mtools' package ships with a
"standard" configuration that matches older, not newer, hardware.

So, by default it has the device 'a:' configured to be /dev/fd0 - not,
as we all remember by now, /dev/sd?, where a USB floppy drive lives.

So, unless you configured mtools yourself, it probably didn't look in
the right place for your raw device when accessing the filesystem.


If you do want to use mtools, or some other raw device based access
technique, you really should look into using udev, or some other tool
like that, to create a consistent device node based on the attached
device, rather than the (somewhat random) assigned device node.

        Daniel

-- 
The PC is the LSD of the '90s.
        -- Timothy Leary, __Guardian_ (June 1, 1996)