[vox-tech] Floppy drive with Linux Mint LMDE 2 MATE

Rod Roark rod at sunsetsystems.com
Wed Aug 2 12:52:52 PDT 2017


Wondering if anyone has any experience/insight with this. I have some
old (1989-91-ish) 3.5" floppy disks that I want to archive the data
from, and a TEAC 1.44 MB drive (actually 2 of them).  The PC is a
homebrew with a Gigabyte H55-USB3 mainboard and older Intel i3 CPU. The
floppy interface is enabled in BIOS settings.

As you may have guessed it's not working. With either "mdir" or "mount
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy" the drive LED comes on for a few seconds and then
a message indicating /dev/fd0 does not exist (not true), and this
reported from dmesg:

> [  138.845258] floppy0: probe failed...
> [  139.243808] floppy0: probe failed...
> etc...
> [  144.821238] blk_update_request: I/O error, dev fd0, sector 0
> [  144.821245] floppy: error -5 while reading block 0

/dev includes this:

  brw-rw---- 1 root disk    2,   0 Aug  2 12:22 fd0

Any thoughts? I've tried 2 different drives, 2 cables, and 3 diskettes.
I'm pretty sure the cable positioning is right.

Rod



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