Floppy Won't Mount or Format, Can't Find fstab.

[wmichaelb]

Hi: I was trying to play with the Menuet OS last night, partly out of curiosity as to what sort of OS would fit on a 1.4 MB floppy. In the process, I tried to format a floppy with Kfloppy. But I got an error message stating:

Internal error: device not correctly defined

I researched a bit on this august forum and found:

http://forums.pcbsd.org/showthread.php?t=12712

"Okay after playing around with this a little bit more I have found that I put the following line in /etc/fstab:
Code:

/dev/fd0 floppy msdosfs rw,noauto 0 0

and do mkdir ./Documents/floppy in each users home directory then it works, but it's still not exactly right but at least it's workable.

For whatever reason, whatever program is doing the mounting in kde for /dev/fd0 it is prefixing it with ~/Documents/. So if I use ~/floppy as suggested earlier in /etc/fstab that program is trying to mount the drive to ~/Documents/~/floppy."


But when I went looking for fstab in /etc, it...wasn't...there. I tried a search, but Dolphin found nothing. Where the bleep is fstab in PC-BSD? Or alternatively, is there a better way to get floppy access? I don't need it often, but it is occasionally useful and I hate the idea of booting up my Windows machine just to format a floppy.

Thanks in advance!

[kmoore134]

Make sure you aren't in the "ports console" and are in regular
"konsole", there should be a valid /etc/fstab there :)

Also, take a look at the newfs_msdos command if you want to manually
format the floppy.

[wmichaelb]

Kris, thanks, I did finally find fstab after using Konsole instead of Ports Console...(8^}).....
and newfs_msdos also works. But when I try to look at the floppy's contents in Dolphin, I get an error message:

"an error occurred while accessing '1440-KB 3.5 " drive'. the system responded: org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.Volume.UnknownFailure: mount: /dev/fd0: operation not supported by device."

The device works; it does respond as noted above to newfs_msdos. So, I go as noted above to edit fstab:

xhost +
su
(password)
kate

and I get another error message:

Could not start process. Cannot stard klauncher. Not connected to Dbus server.

Result: Dolphin won't read the floppy, and for whatever reason, I can't seem to get an
editor to work as root to modify fstab.

Could I impose on you for yet another suggestion or two? Am I missing something else with Kate as su? Do I need to modify my system somewhere to get Dbus to load consistently? Thanks!