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tinhed
Asked: 2011-03-10 11:32:02 +0800 CST

How to disable floppy drive?

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I have a old Athlon X2 based system with an attached floppy drive. I had some old floppies which are now safely backed up on CD's.

Is there a way to simply disable the floppy drive, so that it wont be accessed in any way by the OS? I would not have bothered, but ubuntu seems to continually access the drive, and it is annoyingly noisy. Thanks in advance.

floppy

3 Answers

  1. Go into the bios and shut it off.

    • 11
  2. Best Answer

    A more complicated answer as I have a laptop with no floppy drive.

    1. Edit /etc/fstab to remove reference to floppy.

    2. Edit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist and add this line at the end:

      install floppy /bin/false

    3. Run: sudo update-initramfs -u

    4. Run: sudo update-grub

    5. Reboot.

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  3. I would do a combination of both previous solutions and more.

    First, disable floppy from both /etc/fstab and /etc/modprobe.d/backlist, sudo update-initramfs -u and sudo update-grub. The drive would be disabled at the OS level.

    Second, I would disable the floppy drive on the BIOS settings, if possible. Most BIOSes will let you disable this drive. Look at the keys at very beginning, just after you power the computer on. The drive would then be disabled at the BIOS level.

    Third, I would then (and only then) actually disconnect the floppy drive internally, both data and power. The drive is just GONE !!!

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