IOmega Zip Drives

["Clark Whiting" <crwhiting@hotmail.com>]

I have finally gotten my zipdrive to work correctly under Linux.
What kicked my butt was the fact that I had to have my printer turned
on, even though I wasn't using it, because it was in the chain.
If it wasn't turned on, I got this cryptic Kernel error when I tried
to mount it.

For those that are going down my path and haven't figured it out yet:

Step 1. Turn on both Zip drive AND printer
Step 2. mkdir /zip   (or whatever - need to do this once, of course)
Step 3. rmmod lp
Step 4. insmod ppa
Step 5. mount -t <fs - like ext2> /dev/sda4 /zip
Step 6. Make appropriate entry in the /etc/fstab file.

... and away you go.


However, there is still a problem.

How do you format a zipdisk under Linux?

I can add/change the filesystem by: mkfs -t ext2 /dev/sda4
but I have a NTFS disk that I wanted to over-write and I could not
figure out how to format the #%$! thing while under Linux. I finally
had to reboot Win95 and use the windows formatter (ugh!) -- 
embarassing.

I thought that maybe fdformat might do the trick, but it requires a 
specific driver in /dev -- like /dev/fd0H1440 -- which there isn't
one for /dev/sda4.

Anyone been there and done this?

Thanks.


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