Iomega 250 internal zip drive won't work

[Erk]

I have just installed Mandrake official 10.1 for AMD64 as a dual boot on my AMD64 Asus K8V deluxe motherboard based computer . I expected lots of problems with the onboard Via SATA raid hdd but that all works,as does the DVD and floppy drive.

However the Zip drive icon was not on desktop.

I went into the control panel list of devices and it was there,so I pressed the configure button and the icon is on the desktop now, but when I double click it the file manager comes up, but it does not display the contents of the disk.No errors are reported and it works just fine in W2K.

[Kjel Oslund]

I've been off 10.1 for a while so the details may be a bit fuzzy, but here goes.

 

If you check your /dev/hd* entries you will probably see that there is NO entry for your ZIP drive. Under 10.1 with the 2.6 series kernels ZIP drives are accessed using the ide-floppy driver instead of the ide-scsi driver used in earlier versions of MDK. The ide driver system doesn't seem to detect ZIP drives properly at boot. No /sys/block entries are created and no device files are created in /dev. The simplest way to fix this (at least in 10.2) is to add "ide-floppy" to the /etc/modprobe.preload file. On 10.2 every thing else then works properly (well sort of). In 10.1 I worked around the problem by modifiying /etc/init.d/udev to manually create the /dev/entries for my ZIP drive. You may still have to do that.

 

One further problem that has not yet be resovled: the ide-floppy drive doesn't support changing media! If you mount your ZIP drive using supermount and change disks, you can corrupt the data on your disks. You'll have to go with manual mounts until this problem is fixed (by the ide-floppy and supermount maintainers).

 

If your new to linux all these notes will probably be too high level. Post a reply and try to break it down for you.