Floppy drive weird behaviour. Hoary.

[Norman Silverstone]

On Thu, 2005-04-07 at 09:43 +0100, Jenny Drake wrote:
> For the first time in ages I've needed to write to floppy disks. 
> The same behaviour seems to be happening on any disk I try. 
> Insert disk, it automounts OK and an icon appears to open on the
> desktop.
> Open the icon and I sometimes get a couple of items in it and a free
> space of 396KB. If I try and delete them I get 0 items and a free space
> of 0KB, including if I delete the .Trash folder created on the disk. The
> same thing happens if I try this from a shell. If I do seemingly manage
> to copy another file to the floppy it isn't there the next time I put it
> in the drive. I need to send a small amount of data to a friend with a
> poor internet connection and Windows 2000. I can't find my keyring drive
> (object is too small, house is too messy!) and it seems a waste to burn
> a CD for a couple of MB. 
> 
> This has not been a problem on other distributions.
> 
> Where do I start looking for what is wrong? Any clues? Some of these
> floppies have been used as boot disks in the past, but the problem isn't
> limited to them. Do they need to be reformated as Dos disks? If so how?
> The mkdosfs man page assumes a level of competence I don't have. 
> 
I am running Warty. To format a floppy put the floppy in the drive and
use Applications->System Tools->Floppy Formatter. To use the floppy with
floppy in the drive, Computer->Disks->double click in floppy icon and
drag files to the open window. Remember, when finished, right click
floppy icon on screen and unmount before removing the floppy.  Hope this
helps.

Norman