[plug] Mounting a ZIP 100 IOMEGA drive

[Barry Cugley]

Hello all

The situation is that my Iomega Zip 100, external drive, cannot be mounted by the Debian OS, though it works fine under Windows 98 on the same computer. Incidently, the Zip drive is a scsi device from a Macintosh computer.

I will describe:
	1. what happens when I use the "mount" command;
	2. how the /etc/fstab reads; and
	3. some of what "dmesg" is telling me.

1. The commands #mount /zip100   or #mount /dev/sda4   both produce the same message. That is, "mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda4 or too many mounted file systems."

Since the zip disk works fine under Windows I think the "bad superblock" possibility can be discounted and since the number of "mounted file systems" is minimal, I think this possibility can also be discounted. 

#mount /dev/sda produces the message, "Can't find /dev/sda in /etc/fstab or /etc/mtab"

2. Below is the /etc/fstab settings for mounting the floppy disk, the Windows 98 partition and the Zip drive. I include these three mount points together because it seems to me that they all do much the same thing.

/dev/fd0	/floppy		vfat	defaults,users,noauto	0	0
/dev/hdc2	/win98		vfat	defaults,users,noauto	0	0
/dev/sda4	/zip100		vfat	defaults,noauto,users	0	0

Mounting the floppy drive and the Windows partition works fine. However, mounting the zip drive just does not happen.

3. #dmesg | grep sda  produces the message:
Attached scsi removable disk sda at acsi0, channel 0, id 5, lun 0
....

#dmesg | grep sda4 produces no message at all. Which i suspect means sda4 is not being found by dmesg.

In a desparate move I made the symbolic link #ln -s /dev/sda4 /zip100
and that made no differance at all!!

By the way, #dmesg | grep ZIP  does tell me that the Iomega Zip  100 has been found.

I realize the information provided might be of dubious use to solving my problem. However, I hope someone can help me get this Zip drive to work under Linux.

Regards
Barry