Arch Linux

mac57

Member

From: St. Somewhere

Registered: 2006-01-06

Posts: 302

Website

Mounting IDE ZIP Drives

I have an ATAPI ZIP250 in my machine, and a fresh install of Arch 2007.08.  Arch sees the drive as /dev/sdc. When I pop a disk in the drive, it needs to be mounted as /dev/sdc4. The issue is that device sdc4 has not been created by Arch and thus it will refuse to mount the disk.

I have discovered via trial and error that I can force the creation of this device by doing something rather stupid: attempt to mount the device itself, not the partition. This seems to cause Arch to examine the device and realize that it needs to create extra devices, which it does.

So, what I have to do right now is pop the disk in the drive, then issue:

# mount -t vfat /dev/sdc /mnt/zip

Arch accesses the drive as a result, but this operation always fails, saying something about bad superblocks, filesystems, etc. BUT, it has the happy side effect of creating /dev/sdc4. From there on out, I can deal with the drive with the normal commands.

This is an ongoing annoyance. Is there any way to make this all happen more transparently? I recall reading once that I could do something with udev rules or something else such that /dev/sdc4 would be auto created as needed. Alternately, could I just save off the /dev/sdc4 file and copy it back into place on each boot? Or perhaps some other mechanism?

Does anyone out there have an ATAPI ZIP250 that they have got this seamlessly working on? Thanks!

Last edited by mac57 (2007-08-19 21:29:13)

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Cast off the Microsoft shackles Jan 2005

mac57

Member

From: St. Somewhere

Registered: 2006-01-06

Posts: 302

Website

Re: Mounting IDE ZIP Drives

Solved!

See the lengthy response in this post:

http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=36468

I posted the solution separately, with the most informative title I could come up with, so that others Googling this topic on the web may hopefully easily find it.

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Cast off the Microsoft shackles Jan 2005

mac57

Member

From: St. Somewhere

Registered: 2006-01-06

Posts: 302

Website

Re: Mounting IDE ZIP Drives

Question to moderator: is there a way to mark this thread as solved in the title? I have seen this happen from time to time but have never known how to do it. Can you help with how to mark this thread as solved, or are people merely editing their title to add "[Solved]" to it? Thanks!

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Cast off the Microsoft shackles Jan 2005