I have mandrake 9.2. I recently installed a 100mb IDE zip drive, which I know works.

Mandrake autocreated this in my fstab when I booted:

none /mnt/zip supermount dev=/dev/hdc4,fs=ext2:vfat,--,codepage=850,kudzu,sync,iocharset=iso8859-1 0 0

When I put in an ext2 formatted disk, I get

[root@localhost rotwang]# mount /mnt/zip
mount: permission denied

Notice- I'm ROOT there.

I've even tried formatting the disk as Linux again, which I'm able to do since you don't need to mount a disk to format it.

I put my own entry in fstab to mount vfat discs:

/dev/hdc4 /mnt/zipfat vfat user,rw,exec,noauto 0 0

And that works fine (for vfat discs).

I have two questions:

1. How do I fix (I'm assuming I should just delete Mandrake's fstab entry and try a variation of my vfat entry).

2. If I'm supposed to do number 1 above, then why did mandrake screw up installing my zip drive and is this a bug in Mandrake? Seems like something as simple as recognizing a 100 zip drive would be what mandrake excels at but here I am deleting it's fstab entry?

supermount will automatically mount the disk when you access it. You do not need to explicitly use the mount / umount commands. You might get errors when attempting to use the mount command with supermount enabled.

So there might not be a problem. If you want to go back to the original fstab entry stick the disk in the drive and use whatever means to access it. Before you eject be sure to close any applications using the disk or be sure to select another directory with a file browser or if in a text console use the cd command to change directories.

supermount does have its problems and you might find it better not to enable it. Some apps do not like supermount and it might unmount the disk when its least expected.

try this and see if it works........

Thank you, you're right. One probelm tho-

When I put in a zip and cd to my /mnt/zip dir, I only have read access as a user (I need root to be able to write files to the disk). But, the permissions on my /mnt/zip dir are 777. When I formated the disk I was root. (ran fdisk and then mke2fs as root).

How do I make the disk's base "/" dir be 770?

thank you

How do I work this thing? I am trying to get permission.zip

Thomas Jennings,
Welcome to LinuxQuestions. You do not mention what distribution (assume Mandriva?) / version you are running. Assuming the disk is still formated as FAT32 add the umask=000 option to the /etc/fstab entry for read / write by anyone i.e.

/dev/sda4 /mnt/zip vfat users,noauto,umask=000 0 0

Change /dev/sda4 to the actual device ID (an already formated zip disk still uses 4th partition). noauto does not mount the drive at bootup.