Newbie problems with USB, ACPI and floppy

[Andrej Prsa <andrej prsa fiz uni-lj si>]

Hello, everyone!

This is my first post and I hope you'll forgive me for asking newbie
questions! :)

1.)

I have a pretty recent laptop under RedHat 7.3 and I am having problems
recompiling the kernel. Well, the recompiling itself works almost
perfectly, but I have serious problems with persuading USB and ACPI to
work simultaneously. If ACPI is disabled and only APM is built in, USB
works fine, but if I select ACPI (with everything that comes with it,
except debugging messages), USB takeover fails. I am sure I changed
nothing else: I took a .config from a running kernel (from errata, 2.4.18,
config I found in the /boot directory), recompiled it again without ACPI
support and USB worked; changed only ACPI support and USB no longer works,
ACPI works. This is really weary for me, because I have spent 2 days on
narrowing the problem and that's it.

Also, I found out that if I want to avoid unresolved symbols in Char
Devices->Gericom Battery Support, I have to either turn it off or to build
APM support into the kernel. I turned the Gericom Battery Support off,
since I don't have a Gericom laptop nor its battery. ;)

Well, that's basically it. I am running 2.4.18 kernel. Before I attach any
lspci and dmesg stuff, I'd really like to hear what you guys think?

2.)

I have a USB floppy that works without issues. During bootup I kept
getting the error "modprobe: modprobe: can't locate module block-major-2",
which is a floppy to my understanding; since I have a USB floppy, I added
a following line to /etc/modules.conf: alias block-major-2 off. This
prevented that message of showing up again. Now I want to format a
diskette; by issuing fdformat /dev/fd0H1440 I get an error saying there is
no such device. If I try to mount /dev/sda, everything is OK. So my
question
is: how do I format a diskette?


Thanks,

Andrej