floppy drive freezes my system

[JARDINE, Jeff]

Hi there,
	I've been using Linux for five years (but still by NO means an
expert), and have almost always been able to solve my own problems by
looking around the net. However, I haven't found any reference to this
problem anywhere.
	My father in law built us a new system a couple of months ago with
Windows XP on one partition and Red Hat 9 (kernel is 2.4.8, I believe) on
another.  The floppy drive works fine under Windoze but, embarrassingly,
when I try to read/write to floppy drive from Linux the system freezes -
hard.

	I'll mount the drive with a floppy known to be OK on other Linux
boxes:

mount /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy

	Then I try to read or write to it.  The light on the floppy drive
remains on, and the system completely freezes up and requires a hard boot.

	I can format a floppy but can't read/write the same floppy.  I've
also tried the msdos filesystem with the same result:

mount -t msdos /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy

	My fstab looks like this:

/dev/fd0      /mnt/floppy       auto      user,noauto   0 0

	Any ideas??

	Jeff J