Here's what I learned today.
I do not have a floppy drive. udev creates /dev/fd0 and /dev/fd1 when I boot up.
Maybe it shouldn't (since I don't have a floppy drive, I dunno). This happens
both with the old kernel and the new kernel.
gparted calls /sbin/blkid if it exists.
If I boot in the old kernel and run /sbin/blkid, it never looks at /dev/fd0.
If I boot in the new kernel and run /sbin/blkid, it does look at /dev/fd0,
and it hangs. I learned that if you wait (in my case 9 minutes), it will
eventually time out and return. Similarly, if you start gparted and
wait for about 9 minutes, it will start up.
In the old kernel, if I run "/sbin/blkid /dev/fd0" is hangs.
In both the old and new kernel, "/sbin/blkid /dev/fd1"
works immediately. I have no idea what the difference
is between fd0 and fd1: when I run ls -l they sure look
the same to me.
On my laptop, running the new kernel, gparted starts
up fine, but "/sbin/blkid /dev/fd0" hangs as well.
There appears to be something special about
/dev/fd0 that I just am missing.
I don't know if I'll ever figure out why in the new kernel, blkid looks
at /dev/fd0 but in the old kernel, it does not. I'm still looking,
but I'm in over my head already.....
For right now, I am just manually removing /dev/fd0 after I boot up
and then gparted and blkid behave appropriately. I'm not too worried
about breaking anything because I know when I reboot, udev will
recreate /dev/fd0 it is really is needed. If anyone has an opinion
on if it's OK to remove /dev/fd0 (since I don't have a floppy drive),
maybe I'll try to figure out how to modify the udev rules to stop
creating those files. That still isn't the real fix, either, I know.
xr200
