How can I get a USB floppy drive to work?

I have a Toshiba USB floppy drive that I need to use under Ubuntu. When I connect it, and insert a floppy disk in it, I do not see anything mounted under Ubuntu 10.10.

I was suspecting the hardware and/or the floppy disk to be defective, and so I tested the floppy disk as well as the floppy drive itself under Windows XP, and everything was just fine.

I was able to find the following instructions:

• Add the following line to the /etc/modules file:

  floppy

• Enter the following shell commands:

  mkdir /media/floppy
mount -t vfat /dev/sdc /media/floppy -o uid=1000

This will mount the floppy, but I would like this to happen automatically, so when I connect the drive to the USB port, it automatically mounts the floppy.

How can I make this work? Or does Ubuntu only work with internal Floppy drives?

The following procedure worked instantly on Ubuntu 12.04:

REMARK:
The df command shows that /dev/sdd show that d the last assigned drive in use. I need to know this to find the next available one, which is used in the subsequent sudo mount ... command. In my case, the next drive will be /dev/sde .

You will need to determine the correct drive for your own system. For example, you might have /dev/sda, or sdb, or sdc.

So, first, to see the drive information: df

Next, run mkdir and mount :

 mkdir /mt/ee1

 sudo mount -t vfat /dev/sde /mt/ee1 -o uid=1000

For automatic execution at boot time, I normally use Perl scripts, which detect and adapt automatically and give stable names to the partitions.

I do not need this at this point of time for floppies, and therefore I didn't optimize it. Perhaps the command "mount ..." is not optimal....)

A more general but a bit primitive solution would be to create a bash/batch file with multiple lines as above with sudo... , with the several probable possible variants /dev/sd... on the specific PC.

Then there might be a call of this file in the settings of "Startup Applications". I did not test this.

In addition, this does not deal with the aspect of removing or inserting a different floppy disk. This could be done in some automatic or at least semi-automatic manner....

I do not know if the way above is optimal. I just wanted to add helpful information, after having settled my own problem with the preceding answers.

On my older systems with built-in floppy drives, the drive is designated as /dev/fd0. Unfortunately, later releases of Ubuntu do not automatically mount these drives, nor do they create a directory in /media for it.

To mount my drive, I first have to create a directory to mount it in, /media/floppy. Then I can mount it using sudo mount /dev/fd0 /media/floppy.

Make sure there is a floppy disk in the drive or else there is nothing to mount! Don't sudo mount or else you can only access with root privileges.

First, to see the drive information, run df.

On my system with one HD the floppy appears as sdb (sda was the hard drive)

Then to mount:

udisks --mount /dev/sdb --mount-fstype=vfat

e.g:

fred@Ubuntu1:~$ udisks --mount /dev/sdb --mount-fstype=vfat
Mounted /org/freedesktop/UDisks/devices/sdb at /media/MM259_32BIT
fred@Ubuntu1:~$ df
Filesystem     1K-blocks    Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1      152030356 9315352 134992252   7% /
udev              890692       4    890688   1% /dev
tmpfs             360384     856    359528   1% /run
none                5120       0      5120   0% /run/lock
none              900956     292    900664   1% /run/shm
/dev/sdb            1424    1397        27  99% /media/MM259_32BIT