[K12OSN] floppy drive suddenly not working

[Will Hatch]

I managed to fix broken packages that I had by using apt, which gave me back the gnome applets that were dropped when I did a pile of updates.  Now, a student brought to my attention that the floppy access utility (mtools) isn't working.  It tried to use it, even logged in as root, and it isn't working.  It says that the drive is locked, that 'A:' is not supported.  Any ideas?  Do I need to reboot the server after I fix broken packages?  thanks.