RE: [TCLUG:733] IOmega Zip Drives

[Ben Kochie <ben@intexp.com>]

there are several problems with the PPA zip drives, mostly because of the
simple way the parport->SCSI converter works (inside the zip drive)

if i remember correctly, you can not fdisk a PPA zip drive, but you can fdisk a
scsi zip drive.
this leaves the problem that you can't change the fs type argument in the zip
partition table... 
there may be ways to partiton, and format, using the iomega utils, but they
have not been reverse engineered.. (iomega provided no support to the linux
people)


On 27-Jul-98 Clark Whiting wrote:
> 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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Thank You,
        Ben Kochie (ben@intexp.com)

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