On Tuesday 02 October 2001 11:42, you wrote: > On Tue, Oct 02, 2001 at 10:49:47AM -0500, Ben Stallings wrote: > > Here's my problem... if I have the CD-ROM (or DVD) drive in the bay at > > startup and then put in the floppy drive later, I can't mount it RW > > because hdc definited itself at startup as read-only. The only way I've > > found to redefine hdc as writeable is to restart linux with the floppy > > drive in the bay. Is there a better way? > > 1. Do a > ls -l /dev/hdc > > if it doesn't look like > brw-rw---- 1 root disk 22, 0 Aug 8 11:05 /dev/hdc > > do a > chmod 660 /dev/hdc Tried that, first thing when I was told the device was "write-protected." (I put this in quotes because I hadn't seen Linux call something "write-protected" before, just read-only or unwritable.) The same error message occurred after doing the chmod, even though /dev/hdc was then listed as rw. > 2. What linux distribution are you using, what kernel (uname -a) Yellow Dog 2.0 is my distribution, 2.2.19-1i is my kernel. Mike Hick suggested recompiling the kernel with the IDE Floppy driver module. Unless I'm mistaken, this is not an IDE or SCSI connection, but a proprietary Apple interface. I was pleased that Yellow Dog recognized it at all, let alone allowed me to hot-swap drives. But being able to write to floppies is important sometimes, so I figured I'd ask. --Ben