Not seeing Floppy

[borgward]

Mate 17.1 32bit not seeing floppy drive. BIOS sees it. Should I expect 17.1 to see the floppy drive?

[Pjotr]

Only when it contains a floppy. Geez, do those still exist?

[BG405]

Only when it contains a floppy.

Spot on & yes, they do still exist; in fact are still available NEW from the likes of floppydisk.com, even the 5¼" in DD & HD and 8" disks. I have boxes of 5¼" disks and a fair few 3½" disks too. Have been archiving them and experimenting.

OP: Be aware it's necessary to unmount the disk before ejecting it, as with other removable media

[borgward]

Not seeing it with floppy in the drive. Should the drive be recognized if the floppy is bad?

[BG405]

If it's unreadable, it will not be recognized by file managers etc..

Is this a USB drive, by the way, or an internal one? Reason I ask is that on one of my machines, the 5¼" drive in my machine is the first and the 3½" is the second, but (Puppy) Linux doesn't see the second drive at all although it works fine with the USB 3½" floppy drive. You might need to put the drive at the other side of the twist assuming your FDD cable has one, otherwise change the drive select jumper from 0 to 1 or vice versa which will probably mean the BIOS won't report it correctly, but Linux should. Experimentation is probably key here.

If it's a USB drive you will need tools in order to format etc. which I should be able to help you with.

[borgward]

It's internal. Will it be seen if it has a blank floppy that is good? Only one floppy drive on this machine. By "You might need to put the drive at the other side of the twist assuming your FDD cable has one," you mean swap the cable end for end?

[BG405]

By "You might need to put the drive at the other side of the twist assuming your FDD cable has one," you mean swap the cable end for end?

That won't work. If there's no twist in the cable (probably single connector on each end rather than three, one at one end and two near & at the other end, the twist being between thesee two) the only way is to change the drive jumper.

Could you post the model number of the floppy drive? I might be able to find something on this.

I'll need to fix my tower with the single floppy as it needs a couple of caps replacing on the motherboard, hopefully this week so I'll test that one & see what happens.

[borgward]

The cable has only 1 connector at each end. The dive does not have a jumper. Maybe I am overlooking it. Would the jumper be on the mobo? The floppy drive is NEC FD1231H. I have a spare, a Sony MPF920-F. Both are 3-1/2" internal.

Has Linux never recognized floppy drives unless there is a floppy in them?

[FreedomTruth]

I'm using XFCE 18.2 so a little different ... but yes, "Floppy Disk" shows up on the side of the file manager, as something to mount (whether there is a diskette in it or not).
Also, I have the following directories: /media/floppy (symbolic link to /media/floppy0) and /dev/fd0
Actually I don't know why /media/floppy and /media/floppy0 exist. When I mount in file manager, it goes to /media/username/disk.
Anyway, if you have /dev/fd0 you can try manually mounting a formatted diskette. Make a mountpoint sudo mkdir /mnt/floppy then mount sudo mount /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy If all goes well, you can view your files in /mnt/floppy then. If it needs formatting, a quick search shows these steps: sudo fdformat /dev/fd0 to format, then create filesystem sudo mkfs.vfat /dev/fd0

As a side note, or rather question, does "Floppy Drive" show up in the gnome-disks utility for you?

gnome-disks.png

[borgward]

Does not show up in gnome-disks with either floppy in it or not. It does show up in the BIOS.