Thanks for the tip.  I'll do some reading and try again.  I'm glad someone 
confirmed what I thought about the supermount feature (busted).
I knew something had changed in 8.1.  Accessing my removable media devices 
is much easier except for the #@*%$ zip.  This must be the devfs 
feature.  Sorry Florin, your strace tip is a little over my head :-\   I'll 
get back to this later.  Thanks everybody.


At 02:33 AM 11/13/2001, you wrote:
>On Saturday 10 November 2001 10:40 pm, you wrote:
> > I'll try to answer all your questions as best I can.
>
>I had a USB Zip 250 and Mandrake 8.1 and it responded with pretty much
>exactly the same errors.  Although I have since removed it from my system,
>you can find a fair amount of info and discussion concerning this problem on
>the Mandrake User board under "Hardware".  Since implementing devfs many
>people experience problems with USB devices.  I previously ran Mandrake 8.0
>with "supermount" and had no problems with my USB devices.  There is a devfs
>writeup on the Mandrake Forum page.  This info should be pertinent regardless
>of the distro you using.
>
>Devfs provides another method of supplying the character and block special
>devices that form the /dev directory.  This is a kernel space device manager.
>  There is also a user space portion called devfsd for user overrides.  Most
>distro's are not utilizing devfs as default.  Mandrake 8.1 is the first, I
>think.  Also, supermount is currently broken in 8.1, and by default in
>disabled (but should be fixed soon).
>
>Beyond that, I don't know much more...