Multiple /dev entries for the floppy drive, can not write to drive

Question

I have an old computer that I am trying to use to write to a floppy. It is running Ubuntu 10.10 and is a Dell. Every time I try to mount the floppy drive, it fails (probably because I don't know the filesystem and because the computer can't recognize it either). When I try to write to the drive using dd, it fails saying that there was an "Input/Output error writing to /dev/fd0". The same general I/O errors happen when trying to use fdformat. When I look in the /dev folder, I see a puzzling set of entries:

fd0
fd0u1040

And ten other entries like the last of the two, with different numbers. Can anyone tell me what is wrong? The floppies are Sony Double Density MFD-2DD, if that helps anything. They were also written using a very old Mac (not sure how old though)

Answer 1

You can just use fd0. You don't need to use the devices that manually specify a density. If you want to try, though, the density you are using is 1440. Unfortunately, though, old floppy drives (over 10 years) rarely work.