Doesn't matter which distro I use to boot from cdrom = Kanotix. Mepis. even mandrake install. the process gets to a point wich says checking partitions hda1 hdc hdd then gets stuck at hdd with hdd<3> lost interupt
Lost interupt
Lost interupt
Lost interupt
Lost interupt
Lost interupt
Lost interupt


And so on forever, hda1 is hard drive ,hdc is cdrom, hdd is zip drive. if I unplug the ide cable to zipdrive then things will boot normal but I would like to use zipdrive. Drive works ok in windows side any suggestion how to fix or get past with out having to unplug drive. I never had this problem with any other machine I had before but other machines didnt have zipdrive, is this common ?

machine is sis motherboard,
1000 mhz celeron, 256 mb ram
old 4.2gb hardrive, 32x cdrom,
iomega zipdrive

That's a common error with ide zip drives. I believe linux sees it as a hard drive and freaks when it doesn't see a recognizable partition table for the drive. I would try installing w/o the drive connected then try reconnecting the drive and setting up an entry for the drive in fstab for the drive like so:

/dev/hdd1 /mnt/<mount point> vfat umask=0,user,iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,noauto,exec,quiet 0 0

assuming you can boot with the drive connected after the install. Actually, I'd create the above fstab entry before trying to connect the drive up as the fstab entry will keep it from trying to automount the drive on boot("noauto" option).

Thanks for the post kilgoretrout

Will try it out and see how it works, if not I will install old cdrw I have lying around here somwhere. zip drive is quicker to work with if files are small, drag & drop and all that buisness if you know what i mean. Formatted rw are great to though more storage room