the following is my /etc/fstab:

/dev/hdb1 / ext3 defaults 1 1
/dev/hda1 /windows/C ntfs ro,users,gid=users,umask=0002,nls=iso8859-1 0 0
/dev/hdb5 swap swap pri=42 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts mode=0620,gid=5 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/cdrecorder /media/cdrecorder auto ro,noauto,user,exec 0 0
/dev/cdrom /media/cdrom auto ro,noauto,user,exec 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy auto noauto,user,sync 0 0
/dev/sda /media/zip vfat noauto,user,exec 0 1

and the following is the error I get when trying to mount /media/zip

Could not mount device.
The reported error was:
[mntent]: warning: no final newline at the end of /etc/fstab

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda,
or too many mounted file systems

Yast id's my Zip as /dev/sda which is why fstab says the same...I have tried various FS type's as well (vfat,ext2.ext3.auto)...no luck...I have tried various switches....ie: noauto...auto...00, 01, 02...still no luck. Thoughts, suggestions please?...thanks for your response.

Have you tried mounting it from the command line? e.g. as root

# mount /dev/sda /media/zip

This already looks a bit suspicious to me. For an 'IBM Format' zip 100 I always had to do

# mount /dev/sda4 /media/zip

(or maybe # mount -t msdos /dev/sda4 /media/zip)

For an ext2 formatted zip 100 it was

# mount /dev/sda1 /media/zip

Or give the 'msdos' filesystem type a go too.

yes, have tried the cli (same result) and I have tried sda, sda1, sda2 sda3 sda4...I recently switch to Suse from Redhat and with Redhat I would use the following:

mount -t vfat /dev/sda4 /mnt/zip

this doesnt work either...bootup shows ppa module loading and bootup assigns irq to zip drv....still scratching my head...thoughts? .... please

You could see if it is low-level readable e.g.

dd if=/dev/sda4 of=/dev/null

If that looks OK I would guess the filesystem is corrupted. Not sure what to do in that situation however. Do you have valuable data on the disk?