I have no idea if the following will help us but I list it here for info. If anyone can make improvements on the old advice (4/98), please do so! Idris === http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue28/lg_tips28.html#atapi I just bought an IDE ATAPI iomega Zip drive, and I couldn't find any help at all on how to use it. So, I slogged through, got a great hint from Jeff Tranter (maintainer of the 'eject' utility), and managed to get it working. In the spirit of giving back to the community, here's my (maybe even) five cent tip. Here's how to use an IDE ATAPI zip drive on Linux. First, the kernel: Do _not_ use the "IDE FLOPPY" option (officially the name is CONFIG_BLK_DEV_IDEFLOPPY ). This will work perfectly for reading and writing, but it will not work for ejecting. What you need to do is say yes to the option CONFIG_BLK_DEV_IDESCSI. When this is set, you will treat the IDE ATAPI drive just like a SCSI drive, except without the SCSI card and all that other garbage. After making your kernel, you should get these messages in your startup messages (type dmesg at the prompt if they go by too fast to read): hda: WDC AC34000L, 3815MB w/256kB Cache, CHS=969/128/63 hdb: WDC AC34000L, 3815MB w/256kB Cache, CHS=969/128/63 hdc: TOSHIBA CD-ROM XM-6102B, ATAPI CDROM drive hdd: IOMEGA ZIP 100 ATAPI, ATAPI FLOPPY drive - enabling SCSI emulation ide2: ports already in use, skipping probe ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14 ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15 Floppy drive(s): fd0 is 1.44M FDC 0 is a post-1991 82077 scsi0 : SCSI host adapter emulation for IDE ATAPI devices scsi : 1 host. Vendor: IOMEGA Model: ZIP 100 Rev: 24.D Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 00 Detected scsi removable disk sda at scsi0, channel 0, id 0, lun 0 scsi : detected 1 SCSI disk total. SCSI device sda: hdwr sector= 512 bytes. Sectors= 196608 [96 MB] [0.1 GB] sda: Write Protect is off . . . Partition check: sda: sda4 hda: hda1 hda2 hda3 hda4 hdb: hdb1 hdb2 hdb3 The key is that SCSI simulation will be used only if the native ATAPI driver for that device isn't found. So, since the ATAPI CD driver was compiled into the kernel, it used it. Since the ATAPI removable disk driver wasn't, SCSI emulation was used. Second, the device: If you want to have non-root users be able to mount, unmount, and eject the Zip disks, you've got to make a couple of changes to the default configuration. First thing to do is to change the permissions on the device. As root, type the following: chmod a+rw /dev/sda4 The next thing to do is set a shortcut (eject is easier). Again, as root, type the following: ln -s /dev/sda4 /dev/zip Third, the mount point: Create a mount point for your drive. I like /mnt/zip, so I just do a mkdir /mnt/zip. For ease, you now want to put this into your /etc/fstab. Put a line in that file that looks like /dev/sda4 /mnt/zip auto user,noauto 0 0 The first column is the device, followed by the mount point. The first 'auto' means that it will check to see the file system type when it is mounted. (Hence, you can read not only ext2fs, but also FAT, VFAT, etc.) The 'user' keyword allows average users to mount the disk, and the 'noauto' means that it will not be mounted at startup. I don't know what the two zero's mean, but it works for me. Now, at this point, any user should be able to mount the Zip disk by typing mount /mnt/zip Unmounting would just be umount /mnt/zip. Fourth, formatting the disks: The Zip disks you buy at your corner computer store are formatted for MSDOS. Personally, I prefer to have ext2fs formatted disks, so I don't have to worry about file name conflicts. Hence, I have to reformat them. There are two other oddities. First, the writable partition will be number 4. This is a Macintosh-ism, which you might as well leave. You can run fdisk and change the partition, but it will be much easier to just leave all your disks the same, and that way you won't have to change the line in /etc/fstab for each disk. Second, the initial permissions are not set to be writeable by the user. To handle all this, I do the following, as root (new disk, initially unmounted): (WARNING: This will erase all data on the disk!) /sbin/mke2fs -m 0 /dev/sda4 mount /mnt/zip chmod a+w /mnt/zip umount /mnt/zip Now, whenever the user mounts that disk, she will be able to write to it. Fifth, ejecting: The entire reason for using SCSI emulation is to make it easy to eject the disk. It's easy now: eject zip You can also say 'eject /dev/sda4', but since you created the symbolic link '/dev/zip', eject knows what you mean when you just say 'zip'. One thing about eject is that the average user does not have permission to use it. So, change the permission via setuid: chmod a+s /usr/bin/eject That should allow any user to eject any disk. Sixth, zip tools: Jarrod A. Smith ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) has written a really nifty little program to make mounting, unmounting, ejecting, documenting, and write protecting Zip disks really easy. The name is jaZip, and it is available as an RPM package (jaZip-0.22-3.i386.rpm) from the usual download sites, including ftp://ftp.redhat.com. Go ahead and download it -- it's only 24 K! I hope that covers everything -- if anybody has any questions, please let me know! Steve Beach
