[ale] ZIP drive

[George A. Nies]

> I am a moderately experienced Unix/C programmer, and have been using
> the incomparable Linux OS since 1995.  I now have version 2.0.29
> (Slackware 3.2 CDROM) running on a PC with PCI motherboard and Cyrix
> P200+ CPU.  About 8 months ago, I bought an Iomega internal IDE ZIP
> drive and installed it as the secondary master drive.  I thought that
> Linux would recognise it as an IDE device, but to my surprise I
> could not even get 'fdisk' to talk to it.  I know that the drive is
> supposed to have 98 cylinders, but could not get the BIOS
> ( Award May 1997 ) to accept any combination of C/H/S that I specified.
> 

I've been running an IDE zip drive for over a year on kernel 2.0.33
(plus
a patch I think)  with no problems.  You have to run "make config" and
select the new IDE driver and then IDE floppy support.  Unless your bios
knows about ATAPI floppy drives, don't tell it anything -- select
"not installed".  Make sure your cableing and jumpering is right -- 
nothing wierd like the zip drive being slave and the only device on that
ide bus.  At boot the kernel messages should contain something like:

hdc: IDEZIP_100 ATAPI FLOPPY drive

This tells you that the kernel found it.  Now you can fdisk, mount,
whatever.  Dos preformated zip disks have their data on partition 4 --
/dev/hdc4 in the above example.