I am running Debian Wheezy 7.9 on a D815EEA2 motherboard system and I recently had occasion to use its 1.2MB 5.25" floppy drive. I can mostly use fdtools and mtools successfully. I can format the drive using fdformat and mformat. I can mount the drive conventionally:

sudo mount -t vfat /dev/fd0 /mnt/test. #Successful

But I can't mount the drive using fdmount:

sudo fdmount fd0 /mnt/test#Error fdmount (/dev/fd0): ioctl(code) failed: Operation not permitted

I've tracked things down a bit and the failure occurs at line 741 of fdmount.c:

DO_IOCTL(fd,FDSETPRM,&F);

I've also looked at the kernel a bit and the failure occurs at lines 3236-3237 of floppy.c:

if (!capable(CAP_SYS_ADMIN)) return -EPERM;

I don't know much or anything about linux capabilities but they appear at first glance to be implemented via some sort of per-thread security structure. I'm posting a query to the mailing list before opening a bug report as I don't know whether or not this is a bug or some sort of system administration issue.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,

Paul Ausbeck