Thanks for the numerous responses to my question about mounting ATAPI zip 100 drives in 9.2. Unfortunately, none of the suggestions made worked for me. I have, however, found one thing that seems to work, which I'll pass on since I gather I'm not the only one who has had no luck with this problem. Here's what worked for me: Open the sysconfig Editor in Yast, go to the Hardware section, go to the Hotplug subsection, and change the entry HOTPLUG_DO_MOUNT to no. I also changed the entry HOTPLUG_MOUNT_TYPE to fstab, but I doubt that matters. With this change, the traditional fstab entries like /dev/hdd4 /mnt/zip vfat user, noauto 0 0 seem to work fine for mounting and unmounting the zip drive manually on the command line. My guess is that, with this change, you may have to mount things like cdroms and floppies manually as well. Without this change in Sysconfig, I could find no way to gain access to my zip drive in 9.2. Both the entry above, the entry /dev/hdd /mnt/zip auto user, noauto 0 0 and every variant of either of these that I could dream up produced essentially the same problem. Trying to mount the drive would produce an error msg (for filetype auto in fstab the msg was that the filetype had to be specified -- for filetype vfat the error msg was a much longer and less specific one). After the error msg, the system would go into a loop in which it the drive activity light would come on briefly, the drive would spin briefly, and then the light and spinning would stop. This cycle repeated more often than once a minute and so loaded the system that almost nothing else could be done. The cycling also produced a huge number of error msgs in the syslog like those mentioned in my earlier msg copied below. Moreover, the device /dev/hdd4 was deleted every time. Each time I tried something new, I put it back in with mknod, but it disappeared shortly after the cycling started whenever I tried to mount the drive. What a mess! Best wishes, Gaunce On Mon January 31 2005 1:03 pm, Gaunce Lewis wrote:
I have just installed Suse 9.2, and can't get my Iomega Atapi zip drive to work. The boot log indicates that this drive is detected as hdd. However, when I run the suse hardware tool, it is unable to find the drive unless there is a zip disk in the drive. When I put a zip disk in the drive, the drive acts as if it is being read briefly more frequently than once a minute. The slows the system down dramatically an produces very frequently repeated string of msgs in the system log of the form
Jan 31 00:00:20 linux /etc/dev.d/block/50-hwscan.dev[20540]: new block device /block/hdd/hdd4 Jan 31 00:00:20 linux /etc/dev.d/block/51-subfs.dev[20550]: mount block device /block/hdd/hdd4 Jan 31 00:00:21 linux /etc/dev.d/block/51-subfs.dev[20609]: umount block device /block/hdd/hdd4 Jan 31 00:00:21 linux kernel: hdd: hdd4 Jan 31 00:00:21 linux /etc/dev.d/block/51-subfs.dev[20609]: umount: /dev/hdd4: not mounted Jan 31 00:00:21 linux kernel: hdd: hdd4
As far as I can tell, subfs doesn't support zip drives. I have tried inserting the appropriate entries in fstab for the zip drive such as
/dev/hdd4 /media/zip vfat noauto,users
but this has no effect. Similar fstab entries worked fine in Suse 9.1 and several different versions of Red Hat.
The oddest thing about all of this is that, when I list the directory /dev, there is no entry of the form hdd4. Every other possible hdd# is there, but hdd4 is missing. However, this is the right partition for a vfat formatted zip disk.
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks, Gaunce Lewis