Floppy Disks
To use a floppy disk you can either use mtools or a graphical interface.
Gnome
You need to add an applet to your panel. To do this, right click over the grey/white area at the top of the screen, select add to panel , scroll down the list that appears, and select Disk Mounter then select the button named Add. An icon will now appear in the top panel.
To mount the floppy drive, left click on this icon and select Mount Floppy Drive. A floppy disk icon will now appear on your desktop.
Double click on the floppy disk icon to open it or select left click on the Disk Mounter icon you added earlier and select Open Floppy Drive .
Drag files to the open floppy window to write to the floppy disk.
To remove the floppy, you must first unmount it or you may experience data loss. Either right click on the floppy icon on the desktop, or left click on the Disk Mounter icon on your panel and either way select Unmount Volume You can now safely remove your floppy from the drive.
Command line with Gnome
You can access your floppy disk via the directory /media if you first mount the floppy using the Disk Mounter applet described above. When you list the files in /media you should see a directory corresponding to your floppy. Inside this are the files. To write to the floppy, copy or move a file into the directory.
Command line with mtools
You can continue to use mtools to access your floppy disks via the command line. This is a selection of programs for accessing DOS formatted floppies. See the man page for mtools for details.
The mtools set of commands includes mformat, mcopy, mcd, mdel, mdir, mmove and mtype each of which have a seperate man page.
If you have a floppy which is in DOS format you can copy files to it using
mcopy *.tex a:
(although filenames longer than 8 letters will become mangled to fit the DOS restrictions).
Do not use mcopy -t to copy binary files, this includes pdf files. The "-t" should not be used when transferring any binary file formats since not only will it stop reading at Ctrl-Z, hence truncating the file but it will also do CR/LF conversions which will break many (if not all) binary formats. Use mcopy -t for copying "text" files only.
mdir will show the directory contents of the floppy, while mtype filename will show the contents of a file etc.
To format a floppy you will probably need mformat and possibly fdformat
mtools has a -t option to do a text transfer.
Useful Link