i need my floppy disk drive.

i'm using 5.2.1-RELEASE-p9 but have been told to post to the current mailing 
list about this issue.

several of us from freenode #freebsd have been pulling our hair off trying to 
get our floppy disk drive to work. at some point jer told he's had the flaw 
with his machines for over a year since the early 5.1.

basically i can't mount my floppy drive. with ACPI on my kernel couldn't even 
detect the floppy controller. ever since i removed acpi now my kernel sees 
the controller:

# dmesg|grep fd
fdc0: <Enhanced floppy controller (i82077, NE72065 or clone)> at port 
0x3f7,0x3f0-0x3f5 irq 6 drq 2 on isa0
fdc0: FIFO enabled, 8 bytes threshold

but the fd0 or fdc0 isn't in /dev, there's only a fd/ dir:

ls /dev/f*
0       1       2

so the floppy disk drive is still invisible. i recently replaced my drive with 
a drive and its cable known to work on another machine.

i have offline machines with no burner for which i need the floppy disk to 
communicate with. if 4- can do it why wouldn't 5- ?