Q4OS Forum

clkuch

Member

Registered: 2020-07-05

Posts: 2

Floppy drive setup/issues

Installed Q4OS 3.11 trinity 32 bit / i386 on an old pc (Msi hermes845gv, Intel Celeron 2,8GHz, 256MB RAM) that I bought to backup special format floppy disks for my old sampler keyboard and I haven't been able to get the floppy drive working.

If I go to the hardware device manager it shows the floppy drive but with Device class: <n/a> Serial number: <unknown> Technical details <none>.
If I go to system:/media and double click floppy drive It shows the error  'mount: mount /media/floppy: /dev/fd0 is not a valid block device'

Is there some setup procedure that I have to go through or could this be an hardware issue?
Thanks in advance!

( What I tried so far:

sudo mknod /dev/fd0dss1 b 2 40
sudo setfdprm /dev/fd0dss1 DD DS sect=5 cyl=80 ssize=1024
dd if=/dev/fd0dss1 bs=1024 count=800 of=dumpfile.dd

And it tells me :

dd: error reading '/dev/fd0dss1' : Input/output error
0+0 records in
0+0 records out
0 bytes copied 37.2964 s, 0.0kB/s

I also added these lines to /etc/fstab (there were none about the floppy drive before) :
/dev/fd0        /media/floppy        auto user,noauto  0  0
/dev/fd0dss1  /media/floppydss1  auto user,noauto  0  0

If I try  'mount /media/floppy'  I get  '/dev/fd0 is not a valid block device' ,
and if I try 'mount /media/floppydss1' I get 'wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/fd0dss1, missing codepage or helper program, or other error.'  )

bin

Member

From: U.K.

Registered: 2016-01-28

Posts: 1,301

Re: Floppy drive setup/issues

This may help

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Floppy_disks

If it's just to access the disks then the old 1.8 Trinity may be a better bet as the older the better.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/q4os/f … s-1-orion/

Last edited by bin (2020-07-06 06:14)

clkuch

Member

Registered: 2020-07-05

Posts: 2

Re: Floppy drive setup/issues

Thanks, I have managed to find the issue. Turns out for some reason the floppy drive cable was plugged in backwards, which was a pain to troubleshoot. After plugging it in the other way it worked fine.