I recently dropped Mandrake 9.2 from my system and installed Mandrake 10.1. I'm in the process of getting everything working, and have bumped into something odd in trying to get to my external USB Zip drive. I can go into "MCC > Mount points" and it shows an entry for the Zip drive. If I look at its configuration there, it shows all of the following:

Mount point: /mnt/zip
Device: /dev/sda4
Options: supermount,umask=0,user,iocharset=iso8859-1,sync,codepage=850

If I look at all of that, it seems OK, and the first time I looked at it, MCC asked me if I wanted to save the changes to /etc/fstab (after I specified that I would like users to be able to mount the drive). Prior to that /mnt/zip did not exist, nor did /dev/sda4, nor was there an entry in /etc/fstab. At this point /mnt/zip does exist -- if I do an ls on /mnt, I get this:

4 drwxr-xr-x 7 root root 4096 Jan 8 08:32 ./
4 drwxr-xr-x 19 root root 4096 Jan 8 09:15 ../
4 drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Dec 30 03:08 cdrom/
4 drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Dec 30 03:08 cdrom2/
0 drwxrwxrwx 0 root root 0 Jan 8 09:15 floppy/
8 dr-xr-xr-x 1 root root 8192 Jan 6 18:59 windows/
0 drwxrwxrwx 0 root root 0 Jan 8 09:15 zip/

And /etc/fstab looks like this (sorry about the wierd line-wrapping):
/dev/hda6 / ext3 defaults 1 1
/dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom auto umask=0,user,iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,noauto,ro,exec,users 0 0
/dev/hdd /mnt/cdrom2 auto umask=0,user,iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,noauto,ro,exec,users 0 0
none /mnt/floppy supermount dev=/dev/fd0,fs=ext2:vfat,--,umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-1,sync,codepage=850 0 0
/dev/hda1 /mnt/windows ntfs umask=0,nls=iso8859-1,ro 0 0
none /mnt/zip supermount dev=/dev/sda4,fs=auto,--,umask=0,user,iocharset=iso8859-1,sync,codepage=850 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hda5 swap swap defaults 0 0

After I get out of MCC, I can access the Zip drive. After I reboot, however, /dev/sda4 is gone. I can go back into MCC > Mount points and get it to re-do whatever it is doing and I can access the Zip drive until I reboot the system the next time. The changes are sticking in MCC, and the changes are sticking in /etc/fstab, but it seems like the device file itself is disappearing on boot.

Any ideas on how I can get /dev/sda4 to stick around?

Thanks in advance for your help!

I have the same problem with my USB pen drive and with my IDE ATAPI Zip drive. I also had this problem with the upgraded nVidia drivers, although I found a way around that by adding a line containing just "nvidia" to /etc/modules.preload. This doesn't seem to resolve these other problems though.

In general SOMETHING is deleting /dev files dynamically. For my USB pen drive, if I boot with it plugged in, Mandrake 10.1 (I am running Community) recognizes it and places it on the desktop. I can mount, umount, read, write, etc. as long as I want, UNTIL I physically unplug the device. Then /dev/sda1 disappears and nothing seems to bring it back except plugging the drive back in and rebooting.

Does anyone have any clues on this? It seems like a pretty general problem with 10.1...