Lost Drive A: access with new 14.0 install

[DuLac]

So the title says it all.

Previously tried the upgrade to 14.0 but it also resulted in loss of many icons.
(Never noticed how icons are useful to travel in heavy menus)

But the worse is not having drive A:, as it is used often.
So, that would be the priority, and thus this feedback.
_____
Out of topic :
Many attempts were made to restore the icons, from the suggestion in FAQ,
to the reinstall of Salix, then the reinstall of many tools.

Nothing worked, not even using a new account as a pattern to the old
home account. That old account seems to be the problem.

[mimosa]

It would help if you could explain a bit more. So you have a totally pristine installation, and still the icons are messed up? How exactly? Am I right in guessing that you have a separate /home partition which you did not reformat when you did the upgrade? That isn't as straightforward to do as one might imagine, because /home contains all sorts of per-user settings where the defaults will change from one Salix version to another. On the other hand, you can back up any personalised settings and reuse them if they are compatible with the new (14.0) order.

As for Drive A: - what is this? Is it a partition to which you have lost access? Is it an icon to read a floppy disk?

Before getting into the nitty-gritty of your situation, I would suggest that one simple solution (and probably entirely effective) would be just to back up your data and do a fresh install. Unless there is a pressing reason not to do this, it is usually more straightforward than a version upgrade, and would probably take about ten minutes.

What I do is have a separate /data partition rather than /home. But there are as many partition schemes as users.

[DuLac]

Hello and thanks.

You understood correctly on having a /home partition.
I'll give priority to the diskette drive:

Two Pc's are in question:
One with a pristine installation, where the media is not read (it just does not reads with 14.0).
The absence of an icon to drive A: is irrelevant, as long as the drive is found and reads the media.

Then, another PC where the upgrade was done, where the previous version did read the media on the drive.
This last one... after a final full install simply lost the diskette drive. It is not seen, therefore not available.
No mention of it on thunar anymore. It simply was/is not detected.
---

The main reason for mention it here was to give the feedback of what is happening with it.
After all, since version 14.0 both PCs lost drive A: One not reading, and the other not finding it.
I suppose the solution is to get back to 13.37 now that the feedback is delivered.

The icons loss is surely a fault of keeping /home .
The loss of diskette drive is a different subject (one that could be overlooked).
With that in mind, may this feedback be useful to the finalization of Live 14.0
(LIVE allows a broader testing and greater feedback).

Thank you, anyway.
P.S. - No need to bother with it except pointing it out to the main Salix developer,
so it can be the best Salix distro ever, maybe better than the power horse 13.37 seems to be.
Thanks, again.

[mimosa]

Have you tried using gmountman? I think this appears as "Mount manager" in the menu, and may also have a desktop icon; but I don't remember whether it comes installed as standard. The next step after that would be command line tools.

Mounting has changed in 14.0 and this could easily be overlooked as so few people use or even have floppy drives these days. But that is a question of making it work out of the box - even if it doesn't, you can surely make it work.

[jayseye]

Just as a semi-relevant data point, for diagnostic purposes: I can mount and read a 1.44MB floppy from the command line, under Slackel (which is roughly Salix 14 + slackware -current). That's as close as I've got to Salix 14 at the moment, though it may be close enough...

Before testing this at home, it might be a good idea to write-protect the floppy disk.

The command I used to mount the floppy was:

Code: Select all

mount -v /dev/fd0u1440 /mnt/floppy

Just in case that works, and you need command-line help: to list the contents, a sample command would be:

Code: Select all

ls -latrh /mnt/floppy

And to unmount the disk, the command would be:

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umount -v /mnt/floppy

Hope this may be of some help.

[DuLac]

Thank you both.

Only direct mount worked, but only with root access. An improvement anyway.
gmountman just did not found anything, as nothing was detected previously.

Anyway, I had a vague memory of seeing floppy in /etc/fstab, so I checked.
It was in automount, but still not detected.
However... Salix built umask was =00 instead of 000 !!!

After rebooting (It should not be needed but...) the floppy was still not seen.
Even with the usage of the corrected u=000 only root could write on it.
The problem... seems to be prior to fstab declarations.

I.E. auto-detection NOT looking there
As once it is manually mounted... the whole system (as thunar shows) ignores the floppy.
This though the usual USB drives are found (as now usually used and therefore tested).

Now the fstab declaration is:
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,users,rw,fmask=777,dmask=000 0 0
But has to be manually mounted... as the AUTO does NOT work

In this edition, Floppy drives seem to have been forgotten on auto-mounting,
... And this the first feedback on the subject.
Since (with Linux) I'm only a user, I have no idea what the auto-detecting mechanisms are.
Can just point the missing... not knowing how to reach Salix developers. And wait.

Still hopping salix developers may be informed to correct this glitch...
Thanks for the mount instructions... as they were (to me) a precious improvement.
And to the gmountman trial... which proved and pinpointed the problem thunar already suggested.

DuLac.

[jayseye]

You're welcome, DuLac. Glad to hear that my ramblings were of some use. Thanks for realizing that only the root user can mount drives. Wish that I'd remembered to mention that.

At least one of the developers are likely to see most Forum posts. There may be several reasons why they have yet to chime in here, with the top three being lack of appropriate hardware for testing; a feeling that other users are providing the required help; and the impression that this may be an upstream Slackware issue, rather than a problem with Salix per se.

Salix team members are listed at < http://www.salixos.org/wiki/index.php/Salix_OS:Team > and most of them are available via PM (Private Message) through this Forum. E-mail addresses are also listed there.

Otherwise you might provide more motivation for the developers to reply, by adding more information, such as why you need to use floppies, and whether you can access the floppy in Thunar via its mount point, after mounting it manually. (BTW there is likely a way to open a Thunar window as the root user.)

Also detailed error messages may help, such as what's reported when you attempt to access the drive. When working from the GUI (Thunar etc.) it may also help to check for relevant info in the log files under /var/log (I usually sort these by Modification Time to check for changes).

Finally you mentioned USB drives, so it would be useful to know whether your floppy is connected that way, or via the legacy floppy controller.

Good luck, however you decide to proceed