Floppy drive

A floppy drive is a device that reads floppy disks. (In the pre- and early- 1990s it used to be a 5&1/4" floppy). Other types of floppy drives can be LS120 drives, and possibly (but less likely to be considered a floppy) Zip drives. Floppy drives are just short of obsolescence - floppies are used just enough to justify the presence of a floppy drive on a computer.

Mounting Floppy Disks

Under Linux, a floppy drive is usually assigned to the special device file /dev/fd0. For example, one can access a floppy disk as follows...

  # su (enter password)
  # mount /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy
  # exit
  # cd /mnt/floppy

Normal users can mount floppy drives if the user option is configured in fstab. The following line will allow normal users to easily mount floppy disks with the /mnt/floppy mount point.

  /etc/fstab:
  /dev/floppy   /mnt/floppy   vfat  noauto,user 0   0

Then, one can say...

  # mount /mnt/floppy
  # cd /mnt/floppy