After further digging found the solution at https://www.pclinuxos.com/forum/index.p … c=106099.0

Copied "/dev/fd0 /media/floppy auto umask=0,users,iocharset=utf8,noauto,flush,exec 0 0" to the fstab and it works as it should. An floppy icon even shows up on my desktop when mounted.

I'd be careful with simply copying such a configuration onto my system. If you haven't done it already, you best have a look at the manual pages of fstab and mount to really understand what that line does. For example, you probably want to put user instead of users, because, as the manual page of mount explains:

Only the user that mounted a filesystem can unmount it again.  If any user
should be able to unmount it, then use 'users' instead of 'user' in the fstab line.
The 'owner' option is similar to the 'user' option, with the restriction that the
user must be the owner of the special file.  This may be useful e.g. for
/dev/fd if a login script makes the console user owner of this device.  The
'group' option is similar, with the restriction that the user must be member of
the group of the special file.

Copied "/dev/fd0 /media/user/floppy auto umask=0,users,iocharset=utf8,noauto,flush,exec 0 0" to the fstab and it works as it should. I was missing exec and umask=0

An floppy icon now shows up on my desktop when the drive is mounted.

Why a floppy drive you ask? I have a few older systems. 286/386/486s to have fdds.

Thanks for taking the time to read my OP.

.

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
# / was on /dev/sda1 during installation
UUID=4c4cc56c-c494-45d9-9b8a-dc50b744671a /               ext4    errors=remount-ro 0       1
# swap was on /dev/sda5 during installation
UUID=533f2dfa-112a-45bb-a536-655b15414da0 none            swap    sw              0       0
/dev/sr0        /media/cdrom0   udf,iso9660 user,noauto     0       0
/dev/fd0  /media/user/floppy     auto   user,defaults,noauto 

When the drive was mounted I tried "chmod 777" and "chown user /media/user/floppy" on the mount directory /media/user/floppy.

I've tried numerous times to change permissions/ownership but no go.

How exactly did you try to do that and what does the floppy drive entry in your /etc/fstab look like?

Using pcmanfm my USB drive mounts ok and I can copy/paste ok.

I can use mc as root to force the copying of files to fdd. It still throws up permission errors though. Its not ideal as I'd like to access the fdd as a user in MATE.

I know the drive is ok because ChrungBang works fine out of the box.