iomega zip drive automount

[Derrick Hudson]

On 5/18/06, Mark W. <mrkwht at telus.net> wrote:
> (using dapper beta, but the same was observed on breezy)
>
> I have an ide (internal) 100mb iomega zip drive on /dev/hdd,
> and all my media is partitioned/formatted by win2k, so
> that there is a single primary partition, presumably hdd1.

I used to have a similar setup on an old machine (was RedHat 6, then Debian 2.2)

> There is a "Zip Drive" icon in places/computer, but when
> clicking on it mount fails, reporting a failed attemp to mount
> hdd4. Why hdd4 and not hdd1?

That's the way Iomega made the disks.  For whatever reason they chose
to use partition #4 instead of partition #1 for the single partition
on the pre-formatted disks.

> There is no reference to /dev/hdd
> in mtab, and fstab has an entry for hdd (to be mouneted on
> media/hdd).
>
> Where would I look for the documentation on how automounting
> works, so that I can mount zip disks inserted in zip drive
> (user rw, presumably on /media/zip) and unmount/eject them.

One thing you can check is the partition table on the disk.  (I would
use 'cfdisk /dev/hdd', but there may be other (ie graphical) tools
included with Ubuntu)  If your disk really is using partition #1 then
proceed to use that instead of #4.  That may just mean changing the
fstab to use hdd1 instead of hdd4.  I know that I was able to
repartition and reformat Zip disks to use partition 1 when I tried it.
 I sold the disks and drives a while ago so I can't experiment with
how Ubuntu handles it out-of-the-box.

HTH,
-Derrick