[PC-BSD Testing] Testing Floppies

[Ian Robinson]

Re:  Testing Floppies:

First, boot probe recognizes the floppy:

IR at pcbsd-5459]/home/IR(6)% dmesg | grep fd0
fd0: <1440-KB 3.5" drive> on fdc0 drive 0
[IR at pcbsd-5459]/home/IR(7)%

2.  Dolphin does not auto-recognize floppies.  I got the same error
message in Dolphin as Dru and Al.

3.  Regarding what Al said about editing /etc/devfs:

>However it may be some devfs permissions issue or something similar.
>Check etc/devfs.conf and maybe
> duplicate any permissions for cd* to fd*
>
> Al

I put this line into /etc/devfs.conf to mirror the cd permissions,
restarted, and tested, but it did not work.

perm    /dev/fd0        0666


4.  Kris' testing request to try using #mount -t msdosfs /dev/fd0 /mnt
at the command line did work or, now that -t msdosfs variation is
deprecated, #mount_msdosfs /dev/fd0 /mnt.

5.  I adopted Dru Lavigne's method used in The Best of FreeBSD Basics,
p. 259 (shameless plug for her book) by creating a mount point at
/mnt/floppy and editing /etc/fstab with the following line:
/dev/fd0             /mnt/floppy     msdos   rw,noauto               0       0

It did not automount the floppy, it did not mount using Dru's mount
/floppy command, but it did accept a cli command using the complete
path of #mount /mnt/floppy as this output shows:
#
#root at pcbsd-5459# pwd
#/mnt
#root at pcbsd-5459# ls
#floppy
#root at pcbsd-5459# mount /floppy
#mount: /floppy: unknown special file or file system
#root at pcbsd-5459# mount /mnt/floppy
#mount: Using "-t msdosfs", since "-t msdos" is deprecated.
#root at pcbsd-5459# ls -l /mnt/floppy
#total 164
#-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  18709 Feb 22  2007 Converse Loan Policy.wpd
#-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  27231 Feb 21  2007 Converse Owners Policy.wpd
#root at pcbsd-5459#

Ian Robinson
Salem, Ohio