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ravanan 0 Newbie Poster

hi all,
I'm woundering why mounting of floppy drive takes lot of time in 2.6 when compard to 2.4 kernel? can antone please did i made any mistake in mounting. For mounting i gave
#mount sourcedir destnationdir

Thanks in advance.

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Dani AI

Generated

— slow floppy mounts under a 2.6 kernel are usually not caused by the mount command itself but by extra probing/timeouts introduced by the kernel driver and by user-space hotplug/automount helpers that became common with 2.6-era distros. The 2.6 floppy driver does more media checks and will wait on controller responses; udev/automounter/desktop-volume managers may also run rules and programs that add several seconds.

Quick checks to narrow it down:

dmesg | grep -i floppy
lsmod | grep floppy
udevadm monitor --kernel --udev   # watch what runs when the device is accessed

Note whether the delay appears only when the drive is empty, with some disks, or always. If dmesg shows repeated retries or timeouts, that points to driver/hardware probing; if udevadm monitor shows long-running user-space hooks, the automounter or volume manager is the cause.

Practical workarounds that have helped others:

  • Disable or stop the automounter / desktop volume service while testing to see if it removes the pause.
  • Avoid background probing by keeping the floppy module unloaded until needed: modprobe -r floppy and modprobe floppy when required, or blacklist the module if you never use the drive.
  • Add a noauto/fstab entry so automounters do not try to touch the device automatically.
  • If delays persist and dmesg shows controller errors, test hardware/BIOS settings or try another drive — failing controllers often cause long kernel timeouts.

References for specifics and options:

These steps will show whether the slowdown is user-space (udev/automount) or kernel/hardware related and point to the quickest fix.

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