iomega zip drive automount

[Henk Koster]

On Thu, 18 May 2006 15:22:38 -0400, Derrick Hudson wrote:

> 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

I can second that. Use any of the disk partition tools available,
but make sure (by looking at /var/logs/syslog, for example) that
you have the correct device. I had an external ZIP drive that was 
considered as /dev/sda, yours is probably /dev/hdd, but the 
numbering may differ from Windows. I deleted partition 4, made
a new partition 1 and put an ext2 file system on it, just for the
heck of it -- doesn't have to be FAT.