Comment 249 for bug 441835

Martin, nice to hear from you. after the above little digression back to the task at hand

....'so at most this could be an USB drive; no idea whether these are broken as well.'....

I have an eeePC900 and eeePC1000 both with SSD's as well as an acer laptop with amd64; all have the main lucid release udisks version installed NOT the regression to ....build1 (none of these 3 have any floppy drive/controller built in). the usb floppy drive that I'm using is a Sony model MPF82E and it was approx $25.

as you know, the usb floppy drives are enumerated and mapped to /dev/sdX and they work flawless on all 3 pc's - they can boot off floppy diskettes, can make recovery floppies etc with no problems whatsoever. the bios on all 3 pc's above support booting off floppies if esc entered at post.

on the desktop pc's where the floppy drives are connected to the mb floppy controller (this is the typical basic office pc found in probably 99% of companies and homes), the situation is a different , only the regression to udisks .....build1 enables and configures properly the device so that it can be used. my guess is that when the the mb interfaces are probed, the installed/uninstalled devices are enumerated and configured something is going amiss. the floppy drives from what I remember have a 34 pin interface, different than ide that I think has 40. from dmidecode I get this

Port Connector Information
 Internal Reference Designator: FDD
 Internal Connector Type: On Board Floppy
 External Reference Designator:
 External Connector Type: None
 Port Type: 8251 FIFO Compatible

as said in my #228 so far so good - my pc did not manifest any 'side effects' after the regression.

just a humble opinion Martin, I feel that every effort should be made to get this issue solved, as I said, once and for all, doesn't matter how hard it is and what it takes. I say this for the benefit of the community and ubuntu. It is v v hard to accept not only by me but I fell by a v sizable part of the community, that proprietary os's can do it and linux has problems with a basic device such as a floppy drive.

Martin, I'm always here and help you with testing and debugging whenever needed, just let me know.