Mounting an Old Parallel Port Zip Drive
 

What device do I use to mount an old parallel port 100MB Zip drive?


BR
Al Whitener

With the ppa driver, the ZIP drive will appear as a SCSI device. So you would use /dev/sda, assuming there are no other SCSI devices; if there are, it could be sdb, sdc, and so on.

When you load the module, you can read the kernel output with a command like "dmesg | tail". The kernel output after the module loads will tell you which device node specifically it has taken.

It depends on the age of the zip drive. The "newer" units use the imm module.
In addition the device ID will be /dev/sdx4 on an already FAT32 formatted disk. With x being a,b etc as described in the previous post. BTW USB, SATA, Firewire have a SD device ID (or even IDE).

No luck.
 

These devices don't work. I receive a msg saying they're not a valid block device.

Doesn't ZipSlack use the old parallel port drive?

BR
Al Whitener

I have used parallel port Zip drives in the past with Slackware and never had a problem. Are you sure you are using the fourth partition? For some reason (the driver developers said it was an issue on the hardware side) it doesn't show up as the first partition on the disk.

Does dmesg show any devices being recognized when you load the module?

Thanks!
 

Thanks for the input, guys.

I'll check my cables & try it again.

BR
Al Whitener

From what I remember and I do not have any real documentation to present but the reason Jazz and Zip media uses the 4th partition was for compatibility with Mac computers. I had some software to read/analyze Mac floppy disks on a PC and they used the 3rd partition for data. This was about 10 years ago and since no longer have that software to verify.

Did you verify that the imm or ppa module is actually loaded?