[Fdutils] Second FDC not recognised.

Hi again, Have played some more, and here's where I'm at : Primary FDC (on mobo) has 1.44Mb drive connected and powered Secondary FDC (on AHA-1542B) has 1.44Mb drive connected and powered I boot System Rescue CD, and type the following command : modprobe floppy "floppy=4,4,cmos" and I get the following in /var/log/messages : Aug 03 16:11:47 sysresccd floppy4: setting CMOS code to 4 Aug 03 16:11:47 sysresccd Floppy drive(s): fd0 is 2.88M AMI BIOS, fd4 is 1.44M Aug 03 16:11:47 sysresccd FDC 0 is a post-1991 82077 There's no mention of "FDC 1", and /dev only gets populated with device files for fd0; nothing gets created for fd4. So I type : mknod /dev/fd4 b 2 128 chgrp floppy /dev/fd4 chmod 640 /dev/fd4 So /dev/fd4 looks as follows : brw-r----- 1 root floppy 2, 128 2009-08-03 16:12 /dev/fd4 Then as soon as I try and access fd4; with something like : mount /dev/fd4 /mnt/floppy I get : mount: /dev/fd4 is not a valid block device It's as though the second FDC isn't getting detected. The jumper is set for 0x370, and the AHA-1542B works fine as a primary FDC (jumper set for 0x3F0) Surely this should work ? I'd be inclined to suspect the FDC on the AHA-1542B, but it works fine as a primary FDC One thing I did notice; I ran cat /proc/ioports | grep 37, and got the following : 0376-0376 : 0000:00:07.1 0376-0376 : pata_via 0378-037a : parport0 037b-037f : parport0 Is the pata_via blocking the secondary FDC IO port ? I notice my main PC shows something similar : 0376-0376 : 0000:00:06.0 0376-0376 : ide1 0378-037a : parport0 I'm going to try an ISA I/O card, an older PC, and maybe another Linux distro, but I really would welcome any suggestions. TIA Justin