[ale] Are IDE ZIP-drives supported under 2.0.33?

[Mike Nelson]

Howdy folks,
Iomega apparently makes two variants of the ZIP drive that connects to an IDE
cable. Iomega calls one the ATAPI Zip and the other the IDE Zip.
I have the one called IDE Zip. It's is supposed to be an OEM only. Mine came
with my Dell (yes I know, but I bought it before the "nobody asks for Linux"
speech and I would not have purchased a Dell had I known)

It appears to believe itself to be another IDE hard drive. So if you do not
have a good zip disk in the drive at boot time, you have to wait for the timeout
errors that you would get if your regular IDE drive was not spinning. 

Also, my uncle knows this guy who has Win95 and NT4.0, an IDE Zip, and a bunch
of partitions. Basically if this poor fella, who is forced to use these MS
products against his will, tries to boot with a disk in the drive, it thinks
it's a primary partition, so the drive letters of the extended partitions
change, and you can imagine how well Win95 handles that if it happens to be
installed on one of those partitions.
Also, there is a jumper (the fourth one of the master/slave/cableselect that
this other guy, the NT4.0 user, had to move to get it to act right under NT.

If I mount it under Linux, the first time I mount it I have to call it
/dev/hdb4. If I then unmount it and mount it a second time, I have to call it
/dev/hdb1. So, I have some unresolved issues that I haven't investigated as I
suspected it would be better under 2.0.34, and it basically does what I want. 

I do not have the ATAPI ZIP; I hope that you do. It's my understanding that the
ATAPI ZIP support is in the new kernels as the Config option
CONFIG_BLK_DEV_IDEFLOPPY and that it works just fine with Linux.
It specifically mentions the the ATAPI ZIP in 2.0.34, which I downloaded just
a minute ago. 




-------------Original message follows----------------------

Lo, folks --

I installed RH4.2, and have since upgraded to the 2.0.33 kernel.  (I run
libc.so.5.)  RedHat's 'Hardware Compatibility FAQ' says: removeable-
medium IDE drives are not supported, and they specifically mention
Iomega's ZIP as an example.  I recall seeing posts that they may be
supported by the module 'ide-floppy' and/or the kernel config option
'large_floppy'. 

Are these drives supported in a 2.0.x kernel, and if so, how should I
build and install the relevant module(s)?

TIA

  John M. Mills, Senior Research Engineer   --   john.mills at gtri.gatech.edu
    Georgia Tech Research Institute, Georgia Tech, Atlanta, GA 30332-0834
          Phone contacts: 404.894.0151 (voice), 404.894.6285 (FAX)
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E-Mail: Mike Nelson <mnelson at bellsouth.net>
Date: 08-Jun-98
Time: 23:16:23

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