Re: problems mounting MS-DOS floppy
On Tue, Mar 30, 2004 at 02:04:50AM -0500, Lorenzo Prince wrote:
> I am trying to mount an MS-DOS floppy disk. I get the following error message:
>
> lorenzo@prince:~$ mount /floppy
> mount: I could not determine the filesystem type, and none was specified
> lorenzo@prince:~$
>
> Here is the relevant info from /etc/fstab:
>
> /dev/fd0 /floppy auto rw,user,noauto 0 0
>
> But wait... It gets better!
>
> Now, if I run
>
> mount -t msdos /dev/fd0 /floppy
>
> as root and then unmount it and rerun
>
> mount /floppy
>
> from my normal user account, it seems to solve the problem, at least for a short
> time.
Strange. I guess because the (vfat,msdos?) module is loaded it will try
that type as a normal user? I am guessing that msdos is a loadable
kernel module.
Anyway, I think what you want is to put "vfat" or "msdos" into
/etc/filesystems, this will cause the mount to try these additional
types on a mount of an "auto" type. (man mount, search for
/etc/filesystems). Note vfat is the windows format with long filename
support.
HTH
>
> Is this a bug? Is there a work-around for this strange behaviour? I know there
> are the mtools commands, but I want to be able to run Unix commands on the files
> as if they are on the system rather than copying to the Unix tree, running the
> necessary commands and then copying the files back to the floppy, which is what
> it seems mtools would make me have to do. I also tried dosemu as an option, and
> it let me access the files and run DOS commands on them including a rather nice
> edit command, but it was extremely slow.
>
> Any ideas or fixes are welcome.
>
> PRINCE
>
--
Chris Harris <charris@rtcmarketing.com>
Linux --- The best things in life are free!
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