Linux and Floppies

Sometime not too long ago, Fedora stopped loading the floppy disk driver on boot. So if you have and want to use a floppy, you do this:

su
modprobe floppy
mkdir /mnt/floppy
mount /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy

This worked just fine for me under Fedora 17 in late 2012.

Some nitwit is always scolding that "you should just use USB flash drives". And of course they are correct, unless ...

In my case I needed to read some files from an old 3.5 inch floppy, written back around 1995. There was absolutely no other place to get these files. The above process worked perfectly and solved my problem in minutes.

Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Adventures in Computing / tom@mmto.org