Internal Zip drive not recognized

[pseudonym]

Getting my ATAPI zip 100 drive to work has been a serious nightmare for
me. It's finally over thanks to the above tip from le grand penguin.
Thanks!  =D> 

Here's a mini-how-to for enabling zip drives which gathers info from
this and other threads -

1. Ubuntu will need a driver to use, so insert the module 'ide-floppy'
into /etc/modules if it isn't already there - sudo gedit /etc/modules

2. Create a mountpoint. The 'default' directory is /media/zip0 - sudo
mkdir /media/zip0. I don't think it's absolutely necessary, but for
uniformity's sake (to match the mountpoints for other devices listed in
/media) you can create a symbolic link /media/zip - sudo ln --symbolic
/media/zip0 /media/zip

3. Establish your zip drive's device name. Look in /dev and you should
at least be able to see the system block listed - hdb, hdd etc. If your
disks are formatted with fat filesystem Ubuntu will assign partition 4
(hdb4, hdd4); if ext3 the partition number is 1. I don't know about
partitions 2 and 3.  

4. Edit /etc/fstab (sudo gedit /etc/fstab) to include a line for your
zip drive. Mine looks like this -

/dev/hdd4       /media/zip0     auto    rw,user,noauto  0    0

Save, exit and reboot.

Some people report that these steps are enough to enable you to mount
your zip drive. I don't know why, but with me it didn't survive more
than a few reboots. The dreaded '/dev/hdd4 device does not exist'
started popping up each time I tried to mount the drive! 

5. If you still can't get your zip drive to work you will have to edit
/etc/udev/links.conf in accordance with le grand penguin's advice
above. I was lucky enough to be able to tell my major and minor numbers
from looking in Device Manager (Advanced), then worked out the
respective values for my device. My line looks like this -

# Manually create a zip device.
M hdd4 b 22 68

Save, exit, and reboot.

6. Zip away!

This will work with ATAPI zip 100 drives. I guess the procedure would
be the same for Parallel port, SCSI etc but I'm not sure. Obviously the
system blocks would be different at least.

One other zip drive tip is to download and install Iomegaware from
www.iomega.com . You can use this to issue commands to your drive
instead of standard linux ones, but I've found that most of them don't
work on my machine (the fact that the software is nearly 5 years old
may have something to do with this, though.

Cheers!


-- 
pseudonym