Neither 3.4 or 3.6 Can Find My ATAPI Zip 100 Drive

[whell]

Whether I boot up on disk or do a HD install, Knoppix finds all my drives except my internal Iomega Zip 100 drive. I've searched this forum and saw posts that seem to indicate that I'm not alone, and others have had these issues before. FYI - based on some of the guidance I've seen from those other posts, I've run fdisk, and I think what I'm seeing is that fdisk "sees" the zip drive as dev/sda, which doesn't seem right to me (on Mepis Linux, Mepis finds this drive as /dev/sda4).

I'm pretty new to the Linux world, and am trying to decide between Mepis and Knoppix as my distro of choice. Mepis has installed bug free on my system. Knoppix "sees" the drive during boot, but does not create an icon for the zip drive on my desktop. Other than that, I prefer the Knoppix set up for ease of use.

Has anyone come up with an easy fox for this that a newbie like me could implement?

[greenmeanie]

probably because almost everyone has burners now so no one wants to wright a driver for zips anymore.

[tom p]

Well, there are several flavors of IOMEGA Zip 100 drives around; but if you say, during boot your drive is recognized, it surely isn't a driver issue.

Wether your drive is "detected" as /dev/sda or /dev/sda4 depends on how the media in your drive was formatted - with or without partition table. As root user in a console you might want to try the following commands:

First create a mount point:
mkdir /mnt/zipdrive

Then try to mount the zip drive:
mount /dev/sda4 /mnt/zipdrive

If this results in an error message, try
mount /dev/sda /mnt/zipdrive

If this also results in an error message, please post it here. In case you could mount the media without error message, you should now be able to cd /mnt/zipdrive (or open that directory using the file manager) and browse the content of your zip disk. (Note: right know you can only write to your zip disk as root user.) Don't forget to umount /mnt/zipdrive before you remove the zip disk!

Next steps would be to add an entry into your /etc/fstab and a desktop icon to mount your zip drive via mouse click.

Thomas