Floppy disks

The driver for a floppy drive is devb-fdc.

In order to use a floppy disk, you need to ensure that the floppy controller is enabled in the BIOS, and that the BIOS is configured to recognize the correct type of floppy drive (e.g., 1.44 MB / 2.88 MB). The driver uses these locations as default:

I/O port 0x3f0
IRQ 6
DMA 2

If your controller is located at a different address, you can change these locations in the driver's options.

Note:

The default cache size specified by io-blk.so is 15% of system RAM, which is excessive for devb-fdc. You'll probably want to reduce it to something more reasonable:
```
devb-fdc blk cache=512K &
  
```
The device enumerator (see "Device enumeration" in the Controlling How Neutrino Starts chapter) doesn't start devb-fdc by default. If your system has a floppy drive, you can start the driver manually or uncomment the devb-fdc lines in the /etc/system/enum/devices/block file.

The driver creates a /dev/fdx entry, where x is the number of the floppy drive, starting at 0. If no entry appears, the BIOS settings might be incorrect, or there could be a problem with the controller. Check the output from sloginfo for clues.

Once you have an entry in the /dev directory, you need to mount the floppy disk. The mount command detects the type of filesystem you're using (e.g., DOS, QNX 4), but you can also specify it on the command line.

To mount a DOS-formatted floppy disk, type:
```
mount -tdos /dev/fd0 /fs/dos_floppy
  
```
Use mkdosfs to format DOS floppy disks and DOS hard drives. This utility supports FAT 12/16/32.
To mount a QNX 4-formatted floppy disk, type:
```
mount -tqnx4 /dev/fd0 /fs/qnx_floppy
  
```

You don't need to remount the drive when you change floppy disks.

Note: Don't remove a floppy while the driver is still reading or writing data; floppies are quite a bit slower than hard disks, so it can take a while. Make sure the drive light is off.