It worked nicely, emboldened by this success, and with my over confidence fueled by prescription pain-killers, I extrapolated this from the above: /dev/fd0 /home/john/fd0 ext2 noauto,user,ro 1 1

I have: /dev/fd0 /floppy auto defaults,user,noauto 00

Maybe you meant "auto" or "msdos" instead of ext2? ext2 can be used on floppies, but isn't very often. I think I usually run autofs to access the floppy, but this particular machine has avfs making floppies appear at /#a... I don't really recommend avfs for the masses yet.