[AuckLUG] Floppy Drives

[Alaric Wood]

Hope I am sending to the right place.  A dopey old cluck wants an answer 
to a dopey question.  I use Mandriva 2007 Spring on a computer with a 
Pentium 4 and 1 gig of memory.  Amongst its many oddities is a problem 
with floppy drives.  Writing to a floppy is difficult at the best of 
times.  Writing to a floppy that already has data on it is often 
impossible.  On the last failure I examined Properties.  That shows 3 
files totalling 209 KB out of 1.4 meg.  However I cannot write another 
145 KB to the disk.  On Properties the three files show but at the 
bottom it shows only 6% available space so the disk obviously has other 
unseen info.

    The other problem is that the disk mounts automatically as it should 
when a disk is inserted in the drive.  However it can't be unmounted.  
The light stays on and if the disk is withdrawn the drive clicks away 
for ever.  Attempting to use umount returns an error message that the 
drive is busy.  fstab shows supermount for the floppy drive.  Is this a 
Mandriva special or do I need to tinker with fstab and if so what should 
it show.
    Sorry if I am doing the wrong thing on the list, I am not list savvy.

Alaric