I have a non-GUI installation of Mandrake 9.1 which I would like to be able to automount my drives (filesystem is automatically mounted upon insertion of disk, I presume), but I don't know how. Can anyone tell me?

Also, I have a parallel zip drive which I have been able to "modprobe ppa" and use successfully, but do not want to have to type in the modprobe command everytime I want to use the drive. How can I add this to boot? I don't have a very good idea of common Linux files yet, so please be specific in any explanations

Thanks a mil!

your floppy and cd-rom should get mounted automatically since mandrake has the supermount feature. The same is usually true for zip drives. Have you tried if putting in a floppy or zip mounts it automatically?

What does you /etc/fstab look like?

/etc/fstab

/dev/hda6 / ext2 defaults 1 1
none /dev/pts devpts mode=0620 0 0
/dev/hda5 /home ext2 defaults 1 2
/dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom auto usr,iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,noauto,ro,exec 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto user,iocharset=iso8859-1,sync,codepage=850,noauto,exec 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hda1 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/sda4 /mnt/zip auto user,iocharset=iso8859-1,kudzu,codepage=850,noauto,exec 0 0

Hmm, I guess that means the zip is in there already, but still nothing auto-mounts.

Umm ok, I actually don't quite remember Mandrake and where is its modules file, but you can open /etc/rc.d/rc.local and the modprobe ppa line to the end of rc.local, that should do it. You can also try adding the line to /etc/modules.conf if it exists. Good luck!

hm. Mandrake didn't enable supermount for you. Backup your fstab and then as root do
supermount -i enable
and then reboot. This should enable supermount and the system behave the way you want it.

The 'auto' in your fstab means auto-filesystem detection, not that it automounts.

I kinda thought so...but what's the "noauto" mean?

The supermount -i enable command worked perfectly...Thanks, quatsch!

No prob.
the noauto option means that it is not going to be automatically mounted when you start up the system or do mount -a. It is useful for partitions that you don't want to be mounted all the time for whatever reasons or for file systems that might or might not be there at boot time - like floppies and zipdrives.
The supermount feature does the mounting for you when it detects a removable media in one of the relevant drives.

And I was able to add the 'modprobe ppa' line to my /etc/rc.d/rc.local file for my zip drive. Thanks, wonderpun!