[Klug-general] mount floppy 1.4Mb diskettes

[Peter Childs]

2008/7/23 Mike Rentell <michael.rentell at ntlworld.com>:
> Me again with my interminable idiot questions !
>
> I am trying to mount an old 1.4Mb floppy to read some old stuff. If I use a
> console and type:
>
> mount /dev/fd0 -t vfat /media/floppy
>
> ... that seems to work and when I look in /media/floppy the contents are
> visible, but only if I use a blue 720Kb diskette. If I use that line to look
> at the contents of a black (so-called HD) floppy I get nothing.
>
> I've trawled through all the man and help pages but I can't see any
> parameter which makes 1.4Mb floppies mountable.
>
> Am I doing something stupid here?
>
> Any ideas would be most gratefully received. Unfortunately I cut my teeth on
> Hollerith cards and COBOL. All this modern stuff is a bit baffling.  I mean
> there was a time when an HD 1.4Mb diskette was considered quite big enough
> for anything.
>

The colour does not actually tell you the size. If it has a hole in
both top corners of the disk its HD if its only got a whole in one is
DD (Double Sided) of course it could only be single sided with only
360kb. The same command should work, Check what error messages you get
and check your system logs for any hits as to what might be wrong.
(dmesg, /var/log/messages etc) One of the holes marks the disk right
protect the other tells you the size. I'm thinking damaged disk, or
blank.....

1.4Mb should be more than big enough for anything, After all Bill
Gates said that 1Mb of memory is more memory than you'll ever need. so
by that rule I can fit more on my disk than I can in a computer with
more memory than we'll ever actually need.....

Why Then Bill do I need 1024M to run Vista and XP but Linux is still
quite happy with 128M when 1M was more than I am ever going to need.
(Linux will run in less, I still have machines with only 22Mb of
memory but they do struggle a bit, If its got less than 128M windows
95 struggled.)

Peter.