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My ThinkPad X60 doesn't have a floppy drive. What is this "floppy0" icon for?

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ak@myo5a:~$ ls -l /media/
total 8
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root    7 2010-04-29 13:05 floppy -> floppy0
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2010-04-29 13:05 floppy0
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2010-05-12 10:33 iso
ak@myo5a:~$ ls /dev/scd*
ls: cannot access /dev/scd*: No such file or directory
ak@myo5a:~$ egrep -Rs "floppy|scd" /var/log
ak@myo5a:~$

I am not looking for a way to just make this icon go away. I want to understand why it is here.

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  • Please post the contents of your /etc/fstab file.
    – psusi
    Apr 9, 2011 at 18:29
  • I can no longer reproduce this after performing a fresh installation of 11.04.
    – ændrük
    Jun 2, 2011 at 15:04

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
4

You could try deleting 'floppy0' in /media.

Or perhaps blacklisting the floppy driver by editing

/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

and adding

blacklist floppy.

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3

I was confused about this for a while on a computer I built without a floppy drive. I disabled the interface in the BIOS, even, yet it still was being seen by the OS. Turns out there was still an entry for the floppy drive in /etc/fstab that was causing it to be shown, even though there was nothing for it to load.

If removing the line there doesn't do the trick, try adding blacklist floppy to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf to prevent the kernel from loading the floppy driver at all.

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1

The floppy disk drive is a legacy drive and is incorporated in most operating systems so that it is available if required.

Since the distributions of Linux cannot match every hardware configuration they do their best guess at matching the most configurations and hence they have not completely removed it in you particular case.

If you added an external floppy drive you would at least have the device available (although I think it is still blocked somewhere)

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