Hi,
I recently, installed Fedora 3 and am so far very pleased with it. I am still pretty much on the learning curve. The question I have is this. How do I get Fedora to recognize the existance of my zip drive. It appears everything else is working fine. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks
Frank

Try "modprobe ppa" as root. Then "cdrecord -scanbus" should show your zip drive as a scsi device.
And make yourself a member of the group that owns the parallel port device so that you don't have to be root to use it.

kudzu will find your zipdrive after you insert a cartridge.
Results appear in hardware browser, and also when you try fdisk -l.

That gives you a device number like /dev/sdc4. To access this, I use

cd /media
mkdir ZIP-100
mount /dev/sdc4 /media/ZIP-100

You should then be able to see your zipdrive contents in /media/ZIP-100.

Actually, some installations seem to install ZIP-100 automatically in fstab, and you can then see the zipdrive at once when you double-click My Computer on the desktop.

CORRECTION!! sorry, my zipdrive is a USB drive. The parallel drive may work differently.

Hi,
Thanks for the information, I have tried inserting a zip disk in the drive, to see if it would be recognized. I ran the hardware browser and it did not see the zip. I also tried running modprobe ppa. and cdrecord-scanbus. When I tried either of those commands I got message command not found. I am pretty new to Fedora, I had Suse 9.0 before and that pretty well found hardware without much of a hitch. I was never faced with the challenge of configuring hardware through the command line. I went into terminal, switched to root by typing su and the password. I then typed modprobe ppa and got the message command not found. Was that correct, or am I doing something wrong.

Thanks
Frank

Do "su -" instead justr "su" because you need the roots environment - modprobe is in /usr/sbin or /sbin and those are only in root's path.
Fedora is pretty good at hardware detection (but cannot beat Suse), but I guess parallel port devices are somewhat thing of the past. I did have similar problem once but don't remember exactly how it got resolved. Here is some info I found:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/hcl/sh...hp?product=125
and
http://www.fedoraforum.org/forum/arc...php/t-560.html

Thanks for all the help and the links. This gives me a place to start.

Thanks
Frank

Hi,
I am so close to having this done. All I have to do is make an entry in the fstab file. I went to the /etc/fstab and opened the file with vi text editor. At the top of the editior it said that the fstab-sync controls the entry of data into the fstab file. I went to man fstab-sync read thru it but am confused as how to make fstab-sync work. Is it used in conjuction with vi and if so how is it used. Or am I missing something.

Thanks
Frank

As far as I underfstand, fstab-sync is used by hotplug feature. Since your drive is parallel and thus not hot-pluggable, my guess is you can safely add your entry in fstab by hand. On the other hand, it would be much neater if your zip drive could behave the same way as CD-Rom (or any removable media recognized automatically by the system).
In that case I think you have to mess with UDEV, to make it work. I haven't done anything with it myself, so I can't give you any details, but here are some links:
http://www.redhat.com/magazine/002dec04/features/udev/
http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Udev
http://linuxcommand.org/man_pages/udev8.html
http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-12074.html

Hi,
Well this seems to be an ongoing process on getting this zip to work. I have an icon. however when I go to mount the zip it says mount point /mnt/zip100.0 does not exist.
My fstab entry is /dev/sda4/mnt/zip100.0 vfat noauto, user 0 0
Does anybody have any idea of what I am doing wrong.
Thanks
Frank
Also, does anyone know how to get the text editor pico installed on this version of Fedora 3

Hi,
Here is another update, I have the error message down to device /dev/sda4 does not exist. From my previous post a few minutes ago, I found that somehow I deleted the zip directory. I recreated that so this is the only error message I still have. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks
Frank

Look at the output of the dmesg command. Are there any messages that the drive is recognized? You might need the imm instead of the ppa module.

I also read where the ppa or imm module needs to be loaded before the lp module.

This is all info prior to a 2.6 kernel.

This is how I made my zip drive work.

From a command line

insmod imm

this loads the scsi drivers for the zip

Edit fstab

/dev/sda4 /mnt/zip Vfat..blablabla

save this :wq enter

mkdir /mnt/zip


mount /mn/zip
umount /mnt/zip
eject /mnt/zip

You'll have to make a script to insmod imm or you will have to do it everytime you reboot.
This was a old RH9 machine. I do not use the zip anylonger in Fc3. Let me know ifyou need more help.

Thanks for the information but I am still on the learning curve and a bit confused.
The first thing I did was run the modprobe for imm ppa and vfat. I assume they got installed because I got no feedback when I issued the command.
I just ran cdrecord-scanbus again and got this information,
scsibus 1
1,0,0 HL-DE-ST CDRW GCE 8204B 1.07 REMOVABLE CD-ROM
Then I ran the dmesg command and got this information.
[root@local host mnt} #cd zip100.0/
[root@local host zip100.0] # ls
[root@local host zip100.0] #ls
[root@local host ~] #ls

I don't understand the script process involved with the insmod imm command. Were these drivers not installed when I used the modprobe command? I don't quite follow you there. At this point in my learning curve I have not gotten to any sort of scripting.

I have the zip directory made. Are you saying the mount, umount and eject are placed in the zip directory? If not where do they go?

I swear if I get through this I will have learned a lot. Thanks for the help
Frank

Mount, umount and zip are commands that are used to access the filesystem on the zip disk. The zip100.0/
directory will remain empty until the disk is mounted.

Look at the output of the command dmesg. Do you see any messages on the Zip drive?

The only thing I saw from that command is listed as follows:
Then I ran the dmesg command and got this information.
[root@local host mnt} #cd zip100.0/
[root@local host zip100.0] # ls
[root@local host zip100.0] #ls
[root@local host ~] #ls
Does that make any sense to you?
Thanks
Frank