Linux Floppy

This is a bit ambiguous.

(1) Did you not have a floppy mounted at the /mnt/floppy mount point, (and wonder where the files went, or did you have a floppy mounted somewhere else?

In either of these cases, the files should be healthy and living in the actual /mnt/floppy directory on the hard disk. They will be accessible only if there is no floppy mounted at that point.

If you don't have the default "/mnt/floppy" directory, you will have the last file, renamed to "floppy" in the /mnt directory.:-( But that's unlikely ... Mandrake will have generated the mount points.

(2) If you had a Linux formatted floppy mounted, and the files went to it, they won't be accessible on a DOS/Win machine. You will need to get them back to the linux box, and write them to a DOS floppy.

Ah I should have been more specific

I copied file to /mnt/floppy and went an viewed them in /mnt/floppy and assumed that meant they had been copied. It was a winsoze formatted floppy.

From your reply it seems I should copy those files from that directory before getting a floppy mounted or I'll loose them.

So my next question it. If /mnt/floppy was not my floppy then why wasn't it? and what do I have to do to get my floppy mounted?

Aha. The files won't be lost from where they are, unless you explicitly remove (rm) them.

I am sure there is a GUI way to do this, but I know this way. If you are in oldfashioned CLI, or just open a terminal window, then (don't thype comments after "!") :mount ! make sure that there isn't a floppy mounted; if so, do "umount /mnt/floppy" and take it out of the drive ...
ls -l /mnt/floppy ! just see what is there ... there might be more
mkdir /tmp/myfiles ! just for safety, make a place to keep them
cp /mnt/floppy/* /tmp/myfiles ! put the files elsewhere
mount /mnt/floppy ! mount the floppy with the "auto" type, etc
cp /tmp/myfiles/* /mnt/floppy
ls -l /mnt/floppy ! check that they went there
umount /mnt/floppy ! and remove the floppy
rm /mnt/floppy/* ! get rid of the evidence

You can scrub the /tmp/myfiles versions when you are sure you've got the files to MS.

The mount points "/mnt/floppy", "/mnt/cdrom", etc are actual directories on the hard disk. They can contain files. But if you mount a device on them, the only files accessible by the system are those on the mounted device, as long as it is mounted. You could mount a floppy on the "/usr" directory, and the only files available would be those on the floppy. Of course, don't do that, because the system won't work very well like that, but it is possible. You can mount a floppy on "/". :D Power off would fix that.

Thanx muchly :)

I'm slowly getting the hang of it. I've given myself a project that requires emersion in Linux. Best way to learn.