[plug] Mounting a ZIP 100 IOMEGA drive

[Craig Ringer]

> 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."

Hmm. Have you tried to read some raw data from the device to see if you 
can access the disk at all? Perhaps 'dd if=/dev/sda4 of=/tmp/zipout 
bs=1M count=1' would help (retry for /dev/sda if needed).

If it reads data, then perhaps you're using the wrong file system type 
as the error suggests. If you get an I/O error, your zip drive isn't 
being accessed correctly for some reason.

If the dd works, and if you have a spare disk that you don't mind 
erasing, try 'mkdosfs -F 32 /dev/sda4' to see if you can create a new 
DOS filesystem on the disk. If 'mkdosfs' can't be found, apt-get install 
the 'dosfstools' pacakge and try again. Then try 'mount -t vfat 
/dev/sda4 /zip100' to mount it. If this works, you're using the wrong 
filesystem type to access your disks - perhaps they're Mac disks or DOS 
FAT16 ('msdos') filesystems?

> 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. 

And 'wrong FS type'?

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

You normally want to issue a mount command by the mountpoint directory, 
eg mount /floppy or mount /zip100 . In this case you don't have /dev/sda 
mapped to a mount point, so it won't work.

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

Not going to help. Not even slightly - you can't access a device node 
(like /dev/sda4) as a directory, no matter where it is.

Craig Ringer