I have searched everywhere for instructions on how to mount my zip drive, but I can't make sense of any of them.

In /mnt I have cdrom/ cdrom2/ disk/ floppy/ nt/ nt2/ removable/

which are my cd, dvd, ? (empty), floppy, WinXP HDD, other HDD, ? (empty)

I assume that 'removable' should be my zip drive, but I have a disc with files on in the drive and it appears empty when I 'ls'l it. I don't know what 'disk' is meant to be, but that's also empty.

I have kernel 2.4.19-16mdk so it should have usb mass-storage support.

How do I use my Zip drive???

I read somewhere that my Zip drive's device name might be '/dev/sdb4', so I typed 'mount -t vfat /dev/sdb4 /mnt/removable', but it just says 'mount: special device /dev/sdb4 does not exist'.

How do I use my Zip drive??

is it an external paraport model or and internal, does your bios see it? if so, write down where it is (primary-slave, secondary-master, etc. and post it here, also post your /etc/fstab file. if its still dos formatted, it will be the 4th partition, hdx4, sdx4, etc, even though there is only one partition on it, (i don't know, ask iomega what they were thinking). if you've switched it to ext2, it will be the first partion hdx1 etc.

I had another google and I've managed to mount it using:

'mount -t vfat /dev/sda4 /mnt/removable'

This works, but now I want to know how to get it to automatically mount when I log on. I've tried adding the above line to the top of /etc/rc.d.rc.local (just beneath the comments) but this didn't do anything.

Also, when I start KDE, it puts a 'removable media' shortcut on my desktop. I delete it and it reappears next time I log on. How would I stop this happening?

Add in your /etc/fstab file

/dev/sda4 /mnt/removeable -t vfat noauto,user,umask=0 0 0

Then add in your bash startup script file

mount /mnt/removable.

And / Or you can add a shortcut on the desktop too.

/mnt/disk is just a misc mountpoint that Mandrake creates during the install process.

If you had the USB drive connected during the install process then I would of expected a mountpoint to be already there. Check the /etc/fstab to see if you have anything for the /mnt/removable

a very easy solution which works in some versions of linux is

mount -t auto blah blah blah

I have this in my fstab:
/dev/sda4 /mnt/removable auto user,iocharset=iso8859-15,kudzu,codepage=850,noauto,umask=0,exec 0 0

So I just need to add 'mount /mnt/removable' in my bash startup file?
Is that my ~/.bash_profile ?

What if I want it to mount automatically for all users (if I were to add more)?

I've added /mnt/removable in ~/.bash_profile and it mounts my zip drive.

But, how do I stop this annoying 'Removable media' shortcut appearing on my desktop every time I start KDE?

try removing "kudzu" from the /mnt/removable line in your fstab

I've just done that and restarted but it still appears!

I assume it's because I've got my zip drive plugged in and KDE thinks it would be helpful to have a removable media shortcut, (although curiously when I click it, it only has my two cd drives and my floppy).
I assume this because it only started popping up sinse I plugged my zip drive in.