On Jun 19, 2011, at 04:59 , Yasha Karant wrote:

> I have installed lshw.  lshw does seem to give an extensive listing, but lshw-gui does not seem to give much.  As with lshw, does lshw-gui need to be run by root?
> 
> Also, I have a real 1.44 Mbyte floppy drive installed that goes to the floppy drive controller on the mother board (this particular MSI motherboard has SATA, EIDE, and floppy controllers and connectors on the motherboard).  It worked fine under RHEL 5 (CentOS 5.6) on this motherboard.  Under RHEL 6 (SL 6), I find:
> 
> ls -la /dev/fd/*
> ls: cannot access /dev/fd/255: No such file or directory
> ls: cannot access /dev/fd/3: No such file or directory
> lrwx------. 1 ykarant ykarant 64 Jun 18 19:49 /dev/fd/0 -> /dev/pts/0
> lrwx------. 1 ykarant ykarant 64 Jun 18 19:49 /dev/fd/1 -> /dev/pts/0
> lrwx------. 1 ykarant ykarant 64 Jun 18 19:49 /dev/fd/2 -> /dev/pts/0s
> 
> but I cannot seem to access these via a mount, even as root, to access a MS-DOS floppy.  Obviously, I am doing something wrong, but what? Moreover, the mtools (that provides MS-DOS compatibility) used to access the floppy drive as A: but now does nothing.  Presumably, once I understand how to access the floppy drive, things will work.  Would a ln -s /dev/floppy to /dev/fd/0 as well as a ln -s /dev/fd0 to /dev/fd/0 work?

Probably not ;-) Try  "echo 'I am not a floppy drive' > /dev/fd/1" for a hint what these actually are.

> Note that the output of lshw does not show the floppy drive, although the hardware listing utility of RHEL 5 did show this. This is the same hardware with no change to the motherboard BIOS -- the motherboard BIOS utility does show the floppy.

Do floppy devices appear after "modprobe floppy"?

> I realize that this might have to be re-done upon the next upgrade (to SL 6.1), but otherwise should work until /dev is overwritten.


It's created at boot time.

-- 
Stephan Wiesand
DESY -DV-
Platanenenallee 6
15738 Zeuthen, Germany