Carlos E. R. wrote:
The Monday 2007-06-18 at 18:25 -0500, Clark Sann wrote:
It turned out to be very easy to make my 100 MB Parallel port zip drive work. Here are 6 simple steps along with some comments....
1. From a root shell, run modprobe ppa and modprobe imm.
That should be "or".
One of them should work to install the drivers for your parallel port zip drive.
Right.
( I guess "install the drivers" is accurate??
No, it "loads" the driver, or rather, module, which was already "installed" with the kernel. It is an integral part of the kernel, in module form.
I am a little fuzzy as to just what it is that modprobe does. I'm even more fuzzy about what insmod does.)
Let's just say that the former has some intelligence and can load extra modules if necessary, with options, while insmod is "dumb", or rather lower level if you like.
For me, imm did not work, but ppa did.
My research showed that imm only works for newer drives. Mine is REAL old.
Yes, that's correct, ppa is the old version.
I don't really understand why, but when running modprobe, the results of the modprobe command are not shown in the terminal window. Goofy linux.
Classic Linux commands doesn't say any thing if all went well ;-)
Instead you have to go look at var/log/messages to see the results of the execution of the command. One of them should produce messages indicating the parallel port zip drive has been found. The messages will also tell you what device has been created. This will be an entry in the /dev folder. Once I ran modprobe ppa, a new /dev/sda4 folder appeared. Make a note of the folder name.
Or just use the folder straight away.
2. Create a mount point. I added a folder named zip100.0 to /media.... what I ended up was this.... /media/zip100.0.
This becomes the place where the directory of the zip drive will be placed when you get the kernel talking to the hardware.
3. Modify /etc/fstab. This ties the device to the mount point. I modified fstab by adding the following line....
/dev/sda4 /media/zip100.0 vfat auto,user,exec,sync 0 0
This tells the kernel to tie the device (/dev/sda4) to the mount point (/media/zip100.0). It also says that the drive will be formatted using FAT, that it should be automatically mounted (which did not work so you might just as well put in noauto instead),
It will probably be mounted as soon as you load the ppa module. This can be done on boot if wanted.
that any user can mount the drive, that you can execute binaries, and that the mount occurs synchronously.
I prefer to use "noexec" for vfat mounts. I don't like all files be thought as executables in vfat dirs.
4. Now it is time to mount the drive. Everything up to now is setting up the plumbing to allow you to mount.
Stuff a zip disk in the drive, preferably one with data on it. From a shell, type "mount /media/zip100.0" Now you should see the directory of the disk in /media/zip100.0. Isn't linux wonderful? And so easy too!
Yep! :-)
When you are done, issue the command "umount /media/zip100.0". You will not be able to eject the disk until you unmount it. Note, unmount is "umount" not "unmount".
5. There are only two problems remaining. The first is that it sucks to have to enter "modprobe ppa" or "modprobe imm" every time you boot. To fix this, in /etc/init.d/boot.local, add either "modprobe ppa" or "modprobe imm". This will cause the command to be automatically executed at boot time.
Yes, if you have the drive connected permanently.
How to test your new zip drive installation....
Ah, I think there are some extra zip tools in the "mtools" suite: look up "mzip". You can, for instance, write-protect a disc, for instance - but I never tried. And they say it is buggy :-}
Eject should unmount the drive and then eject it. For me eject did not always do the eject but it did always unmount it. You can always eject it manually.
Try using eject a second time.
Also sometimes, the whole thing stops working and you cannot read or unmount or eject. I had to reboot when this happened.
Maybe because you loaded both modules and they conflicted. Also, how the parallel port is defined in the BIOS has an important effect: it may use only 4 bits to communicate with the drive, or 8 bits, or try to use dma - the last doesn't work with mine.
Restarting KDE did not work.
I hope this helps. Unfortunately I no longer have my zip drive or any disks. I only had the system long enough to see if any old disks I had laying around had any useful data on them.
I should do that and move data to CDs...
I will still try to help, especially in the short term while my memory is still good! HA!
I'm going from memory in this respect, too. I haven't used it for more than a year. I could easily be wrong on details.
Just a couple further questions regarding everyones comments.... Regarding etc/modules. I don't have that file. Is that unusual? Can I just create it if I need it? With respect to the problems I was having, I recall there was one disk, I think it was a tools disk...it came with the Iomega drive. Whenever I put that disk in and then tried to mount it, something bad happened and it wouldn't mount. Neither would any other disks until I rebooted. I have a hunch it was some weird format, something other than vfat. It has been so long since I had one of these drives on Win, I just can't remember what was special about that disk. I bet that the suggestion to rmmod and modprobe would have worked. Unfortunately, I don't have the drive any longer so I can't test. Thanks for the comments everyone! Clark -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org