Qemu fails on -fda /dev/fd0 when no medium is present

[Herbert Poetzl]

# qemu-system-x86_64 --version
QEMU emulator version 1.0 (qemu-kvm-1.0), Copyright (c) 2003-2008 Fabrice Bellard

# qemu-system-x86_64 -fda /dev/fd0
qemu-system-x86_64: -fda /dev/fd0: could not open disk image /dev/fd0: No such device or address

Starting with a medium (floppy disk) inserted, then removing or changing the medium works fine.

[Thomas Huth (th-huth)]

Is this still an issue with the latest version of QEMU (currently v2.10), or could we close this ticket nowadays?

[Herbert Poetzl (bertl)]

Sorry, it has been more than five years and I don't have a system with a floppy disk to test anymore.

Best,
Herbert

[John Snow (jnsnow)]

Likely the bug as reported still exists, because this attempts to use the disk image, not the floppy drive as a whole. If there's no floppy inserted, there's no disk image to use. Later versions of QEMU even explicitly remove support for pass-through floppy disks.

Basically, what you want to do is to create a normal emulated floppy drive in QEMU, and then use the block device add commands to use the /dev/fd0 as a media which can then be virtually inserted into the virtual floppy device.

QEMU does not have support for doing pass-through of the floppy controller / drive itself presently. (Uh, unless you have a PCI floppy controller or something, but... you probably don't!)

We can close this bug as WONTFIX, essentially.