Just had a problem where I couldn't write to a floppy -- tried a number of things without luck, and google threads I read indicated "hardware problems" from those answering; but the OPs did not believe that since their floppy works under other OSs... I dug some more and found a workaround which simply involves rmmod/modprobe floppy...
http://bugs.mandrakelinux.com/query.php?bug=98 HTHSomeoneElseAvoidTheHassles
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