Fedora 12 not seeing floppy disk controller [SOLVED]

[Robert Nichols]

Robert Nichols wrote:
> For some reason my F-12 system  is not seeing my floppy disk controller
> at boot time.  If I manually run "modprobe floppy" the controller is
> recognized ("FDC 0 is a post-1991 82077") and the drive works.  Any
> ideas?  F-11  finds the controller OK.

The solution turns out to be really simple.  I did not have the floppy
drive hooked up when I did the install.  As a result, anaconda did
not create the /etc/modprobe.d/floppy-pnp.conf file.  With that file
in place, F-12 sees the floppy drive just fine at boot.

     $ cat /etc/modprobe.d/floppy-pnp.conf
     alias pnp:dPNP0700 floppy
     alias acpi:PNP0700: floppy

The final glitch I had to fix is that all Linux kernels I've tried have
problems with DMA when writing to the built-in floppy controller on my
motherboard (ASUS M4A78T-E).  The symptom is that the driver writes the
first 2 bytes and than hangs forever with the floppy motor running.
Workaround for that is to add "floppy=nodma" as a parameter to the
floppy module.  That's almost certainly non-optimal (it applies to
reading, too), but I don't use floppy disks often enough to care.  I
added a file in /etc/modprobe.d :

     $ cat /etc/modprobe.d/floppy-nodma.conf
     options floppy floppy=nodma

-- 
Bob Nichols     "NOSPAM" is really part of my email address.
                 Do NOT delete it.