Title: HowTo: Getting an ATAPI ZIP drive to work
Description: Problems you may encounter




It is possible that the Zip 100 drive works without any workarounds.

I had problems getting my ZIP 750 to work from the time I started with SuSE 9.2 (about two months ago) and I almost abandonned it to return to Windows because of the problems. The underlying difficulty is, I think, a problem with the ide-floppy driver, which handles the ZIP. It seems to have a hard time handling partitions. As far as I know, all ZIP disks, as well as all JAZ disks, and possibly other IOMEGA disks, are partitioned and set up to use partition number 4 for anything other than Mac use. The ide-floppy driver, at least when used in conjunction with "submount", seemed to be unable consistently to read my ZIP disks, no matter how I set up the entry in fstab. I finally made it work by using SCSI emulation for the Zip drive, which I suppose eliminated ide-floppy from the picture.

A better solution, however, was to eliminate the partitioning of the Zip disk and to format it as a single partitionless gigantic floppy disk. The following is how I did it. I'm not sure if the "fdisk" steps are necessary but I ran out of test disks to experiment.

To start with, you will need an fstab entry for the zip disk with subfs as the filesystem. Mine looks like this:



Substitute "hdb" above with whatever the device assignment for you zip drive is. Make sure you create the folder "zip" within "/media". You will probably then need to reboot to get submount to recognize the fstab entry. Maybe there's another way
if so I don't know it.

To format without partitions:

First, load a zip disk into the drive. Open a terminal and become root ("su").

Issue the command:

substituting whatever device name is your zip drive for "hdx". Type "m" to get the menu, then type "d" to eliminate partition 4. Then type "o" to create an empty DOS partition table and then type "w" to write this to the disk.

You can then format the disk with whatever file system you want. To format with ext2, for example, type "mke2fs /dev/hdx" (still as root). It will then ask if you really want to format the entire disk; say "yes". You will then have a partitionless zip disk formatted with ext2. You will need to navigate to the folder where your disk is mounted and change the permissions from root to yourself. The disk will now work properly with submount. If you format instead with "mkdosfs" the disk will be readable within Windows ( in case that matters ).


Steve

Sources:
Own experience

Credits:
To be added

Comments and Suggestions
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