Andy Whitcroft wrote:
> *** This bug is a duplicate of bug 255651 ***
>     https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/255651
>
> On Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 07:08:55AM -0000, Derek Bollam wrote:
>   
>> She had the answer in a few minutes and now I have access to the floppy 
>> drive.  She did in a few minutes what Ubuntu appear to failed to do in 
>> over twelve months.
>> Basically the floppy drive had been ignored and was not mounted. 
>>     
>
> To save the next person the same pain it would be helpful if you could
> detail the magic as performed by your friend in this bug.  This will:
>
> 1) benefit any person stubmling upon this bug trying to find a solution, and
> 2) allow 'ubuntu' to understand the fix and work out how to prevent it
>    in the future.
>
> Linux is a colaborative effort overall.
>   

Hi,
Below you will find the 'magic' as it was emailed to me.  All I can say 
is "it worked for me" and it may not be perfect since it claims it 
cannot mount while actually doing so.

*******************

Ubuntu has really missed the boat on this floppy problem if they haven't
created a mount point for it. Before doing anything else, check to see
if there is a mount point on your setup by opening a terminal and
running this command:

ls -l /media/

Here is what I see when I run it:

total 16
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2008-05-27 13:35 card
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root    6 2007-09-24 17:54 cdrom -> cdrom0
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2007-09-24 17:54 cdrom0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root    7 2007-09-24 17:54 floppy -> floppy0
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2007-09-24 17:54 floppy0
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2007-11-04 17:16 usbdisk

The "->" indicates a soft link to the real mount point. The one you want
is the floppy0. If it isn't there, you can create it by using your usual
sudo command (with your options s and h) mkdir, such as:

sudo -s -h mkdir /media/floppy0

I am not sure how you give the s and h options. Do as you usually do and
then check the "ls -l" command again to see if your permissions are the
same as mine (drwxr-xr-x). If not, then give this command (preceded by
sudo):

chmod 755 /media/floppy0

That is a shorter way of doing what he says with the g+rwx command.
Do you have the soft link in your listing? Maybe you will need that for
automounting. If it isn't there, give this command (using sudo):

ln -s /media/floppy0 /media/floppy

Leave the additional line in fstab as in mine:

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>

/dev/fd0        /media/floppy0  auto    rw,user,noauto  0       0

Also, leave "floppy" in /etc/modules (without quotation marks and in
lower case).

On Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 09:41:57AM +1300, Derek Bollam wrote:

> > I can always fall back on modprobe floppy in terminal but this thing
> > is beginning to annoy me and to add to the problem I see that gfloppy
> > formatter does not work either.
>   

Try in a terminal with an unmounted floppy:

superformat /dev/fd0 HD

I don't have to use sudo but you may.

********************

There we are, I hope this is of use to all and sundry.
A final thought  - - -   I know from experience that a great number of people would be interested in changing to Linux but are put off by similar experiences to mine.  Does Ubuntu really want more users or do they prefer to remain as a select 'group'?    I think this is an important question and deserves a serious answer from high up in the Canonical hierarchy. I am perfectly willing to give my views as a new and somewhat baffled user if it would help to see things from my level.
D.