[wellylug] floppy drive problem

[bob dugan]

I am using Redhat 8.2.

The old floppy drive was acting oddly.  So I replaced it with a new Dick Smith 
hx5308 and rebooted.
  
The start up messages show "ide-floppydriver 0.99.newide"

But when I try to mount a floppy disk [from the Desktop or command line], I 
get the message "/dev/fd0 is not a valid block device".  
In /var/log/messages, the message is "I/O error, dev 02:00 (floppy), sector 
0"

Without rebooting, I can swap the old drive for the new one and the old drive 
proceeds to read floppy disks [albeit sometimes erratically]. 


Any suggestions?

Thanks
Bob