Floppy Drive--cannot access

[Thomas A. Hulslander]

Well, either I have violated some protocol here and am unaware of it or it's just that no one has any suggestions for me regarding the problems I am having accessing floppy drive. But I will try again because I think I may be zeroing in on the source of the problem...

When booting, I notice that no automounts are defined (or something to that affect.) I have been into some of the WebMin documentation regarding /etc/auto.master, autofs, automount, etc., but it hasn't helped.

This is a new machine built by yours truly running Red Hat 8.

Currently, when I try to access it through shell (mount /mnt/floppy) I get the following:
$ mount /mnt/floppy
/dev/fd0: Input/output error
mount: block device /dev/fd0 is write-protected, mounting read-only
/dev/fd0: Input/output error
mount: I could not determine the filesystem type, and none was specified
$

Do something with the filesystem parameter?

More info...

$ ls /mnt
cdrom cdrw floppy
$ ls -l -a /mnt/floppy
-rw-rw---- 1 Thomas floppy 72603 Aug 31 19:49 /mnt/floppy
$ ls -l -a /dev/floppy
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 3 Dec 28 11:57 /dev/floppy -> fd0

And within the /etc/sysconfig/hwconf... (note the "detached" line)

class: FLOPPY
bus: MISC
detached: 1
device: fd0
driver: unknown
desc: "3.5" 1.44MB floppy drive"

Anyone have suggestions? Thank you all in advance.

As a footnote, I get the following when trying to manually mount the CDROM, but I think that if the filesystem thing is the problem then I might be able to fix CDROM at same time I fix floppy:

Could not mount device.
The reported error was:
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/cdrom,
or too many mounted file systems