Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 202313
Unable to mount a vfat floppy
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:11:40 EST
Description of problem: mounting a vfat formatted floppy fails. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): util-linux-2.13-0.20.4 kernel-2.6.17-1.2174_FC5 How reproducible: 100% Steps to Reproduce: 1. mount /dev/fd0 /media/floppy 2. 3. Actual results: mount: unknown filesystem type 'vfat' Expected results: Successful mount Additional info: As far as I can tell I shouldn't have to install anything special to be able to mount vfat floppies. I also tried using -t msdos in case the man page was incorrect, but that didn't work either. This is low priority, since the floppy was written on a RH6.2 system and I redid it again after reformatting the floppy as ext2, so it isn't blocking anything on my end.
# mount /dev/fd0 /media/floppy # mount | grep floppy /dev/fd0 on /media/floppy type vfat (rw) # uname -r 2.6.17-1.2174_FC5smp # rpm -q util-linux util-linux-2.13-0.20.4 # umount /media/floppy # lsmod | grep fat vfat 16833 0 fat 56285 1 vfat ... so, it works as expected. I think there must be some other problem. Please, check your system logs, dmesg output and your kernel modules.
I just noticed that I hadn't rebooted after installing 2174 and that /lib/modules had been updated and that is most likely the cause. I don't have the floppy here and won't be able to confirm this until tonight. However assuming that it does work tonight, I'll close out the ticket as NOTABUG.
I retested the floppy and it mounts now. So it looks like not having a modules directory for the running kernel was the cause of my problems.