Re: [aclug-L] Zip Drive

["Greg House" <ghouse@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Sanjay Dhar <sxdhar@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


>I have RH 5.2 running on a PC with a 100MB zip drive. I was unable to
>mount that file system and access it. Is there any suppport for zip drives
>in RH 5.2? If so, how can I mount the file system?

Zip drives are supported by all the current distributions of Linux, but
depending on which flavor of Zip you have, you may need to recompile your
kernel to utilize it.

If you have an IDE Zip, it appears as a regular hdx device.  For example, I
have a system here that I've been building, it has the Zip drive as the
slave on the secondary IDE bus.  It appears as /dev/hdd.  If you use DOS
formatted Zip cartridges, they show up as partition 4 (don't know why...).
So for this drive, I'd use the mount command "mount /dev/hdd4 /zip" to mount
it (I created a directory /zip to mount them on).

If you repartition the cartridge with fdisk, creating Linux partitions, they
show up in the regular place (/dev/hdd1 in this case).  You just have to use
mke2fs to put a file system on it after you partition it.

If you have a SCSI Zip drive, it shows up as a normal SCSI device; /dev/sda4
(DOS formatted) or /dev/sda1 (ext2).  Or /sdb4 if on a second SCSI
controller, etc.

If you have a parallel port Zip drive, it appears as a SCSI device.  Where
it comes in the SCSI order of things depends on whether you have other SCSI
devices in the system or not.  If you don't (ie, you use IDE hard drives)
it's /dev/sda4 again.  I don't know if RedHat included kernel support for
the Iomega ppa (parallel port adaptor) SCSI emulation in the kernel you get
by default.  If not, it's pretty easy to compile a new one with the support.
Enable SCSI support, and find the Iomega PPA support underneath that.  Then
when you boot, it'll load the driver.

I have no idea how that'll interact with a printer, it might not be very
friendly.  I've only used it on systems that only had a PPA Zip or a
printer.  Seems like I read somewhere that you couldn't use both on the same
parallel port, but I could be wrong.

Greg

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