[StAndrews and Fife LUG] Fwd: Happy New Year!

[David Tillotson]

In message <1041465855.3e1381ffc00ec@webmail.nx14.com>, Stuart Anderson
<stuart@nx14.com> writes
>----- Forwarded message from John R Leddy <johnleddy@btopenworld.com> -----
>Yes, I'd like to be on the mailing list.

Assuming that John's on the list!

>Perhaps you could help with a slight problem.
>When I try to mount a floppy, a dialogue box opens:
>Error
>mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/fd0,
>or too many mounted file systems

How are you mounting the floppy? As you mention a dialog box, I suspect
that you're using the KDE supermount system. This is known to be
somewhat flaky (at least on Mandrake), and IMHO is not really necessary.

Open a command window and use the following command:
        mount /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy
This is assuming that /mnt/floppy exists (usually does!)
If it fails with a permissions error, try after an su to root.
If it comes up with the same as the error box, there are two
possibilities:-
1. Your distro doesn't include the autofs code, so you'll need to
specify the filesystem in use on the disk ('mount -t vfat ...' for a DOS
formatted disk.) man mount is you friend in this case.
2. The floppy is borked :-( Not a lot you can do here (although I have
read of people using dd to take an image of the disk, and then tweaking
the image to produce a mountable filesystem.

>As this is the only back-up of a wee website I am designing,
>10 days work so far, your help would be gratefully appreciated.
>The folders and files are no longer on my hard drive.

Ouch! This is about the only advantage of FAT12/16/32 that I know of -
you can 'undelete' files (if you're lucky.)

Best of luck, and all the best for 2003 to everyone who reads this!
-- 
David Tillotson