Internal IDE/Atapi Zip 250 not recognized. . .

[krp]

Hi all,

Am having a bit of a problem with my zip drive. I can't seem to get my zip drive (a) recognized and (b) mounted.

I have done:

a. sudo lshw -C disk (shows the zip as hdb)
b. Created a new mount point (/media/zip0)
c. Added the zip to the /etc/fstab (/dev/hdb4 /media/zip0 vfat,auto defaults,user,noauto 0 0)
d. There is an hdb entry in /dev
e. Am using Xubuntu v6.06

When I sudo mount -a (restarting the fstab) I get a "line 11 in /etc/fstab is bad." I have no clue what is "bad."

Anybody have an idea or two?

krp

[benjaminq]

What does dmesg say when you plug in the disconnected zip? Generally the last lines will concern the new device and give some information.

The fstab requires to end with an empty line, otherwise it chokes. If line 11 is the one you added it appears that maybe the filesystem descriptor should only read auto and not vfat,auto since auto already includes vfat. Perhaps also vfat will do if you know that you only have vfat zip disks and none with udf ...

Benjamin

[krp]

Hi,

What does dmesg say when you plug in the disconnected zip? Generally the last lines will concern the new device and give some information.

Here is my dmesg (only drives are shown)

[4294672.353000] ide0: BM-DMA at 0xc000-0xc007, BIOS settings: hda:DMA, hdb:DMA
[4294672.353000] ide1: BM-DMA at 0xc008-0xc00f, BIOS settings: hdc:DMA, hdd:DMA
[4294672.353000] Probing IDE interface ide0...
[4294672.739000] hda: WDC WD400JB-00ENA0, ATA DISK drive
[4294673.453000] hdb: IOMEGA ZIP 250 ATAPI, ATAPI FLOPPY drive
[4294673.506000] ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
[4294673.506000] Probing IDE interface ide1...
[4294674.300000] hdc: LTN526D, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
[4294675.014000] hdd: LITE-ON LTR-52246S, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
[4294675.068000] ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15

[4294675.080000] hda: max request size: 128KiB
[4294675.097000] hda: 78165360 sectors (40020 MB) w/8192KiB Cache, CHS=65535/16/63, UDMA(100)

[4294686.850000] hdb: No disk in drive
[4294686.878000] hdb: 0kB, 0/64/32 CHS, 4096 kBps, 512 sector size, 2941 rpm

[4294687.344000] hdb: No disk in drive
[4294687.371000] hdb: No disk in drive

Now I could be very wrong, but it appears that the kernel is 'seeing' the drive (internal ide type).

The fstab requires to end with an empty line, otherwise it chokes. If line 11 is the one you added it appears that maybe the filesystem descriptor should only read auto and not vfat,auto since auto already includes vfat. Perhaps also vfat will do if you know that you only have vfat zip disks and none with udf ...

When I altered my /etc/fstab I *did* remove the empty line. I put it back and now -- no errors. Thanks for that piece of information. Alas, no joy on mounting a zip disk. All my zip disks are of the vfat kind.

krp

[benjaminq]

Alas, no joy on mounting a zip disk. All my zip disks are of the vfat kind.

Hm and what does dmesg tell when you insert a disk? Does it work when a disc is in the drive during startup of the system?

Maybe udev is missing a point here, did the drive work with other distros?

BEnjamin

[krp]

Hiya,

Hm and what does dmesg tell when you insert a disk? Does it work when a disc is in the drive during startup of the system?

With a disk inserted at initial system startup I can see the drive light flashing and so on. However, once booted, I still am unable to mount the drive. I get the following error:

can't find /zip0 in /etc/fstab or /etc/mtab

I have not touched the /etc/mtab (I don't know what to put in there anyway).

Here is the dmesg (drives only) with a zip disk inserted at initial boot:

[4294672.051000] ide0: BM-DMA at 0xc000-0xc007, BIOS settings: hda:DMA, hdb:DMA
[4294672.051000] ide1: BM-DMA at 0xc008-0xc00f, BIOS settings: hdc:DMA, hdd:DMA
[4294672.051000] Probing IDE interface ide0...
[4294672.437000] hda: WDC WD400JB-00ENA0, ATA DISK drive
[4294673.151000] hdb: IOMEGA ZIP 250 ATAPI, ATAPI FLOPPY drive
[4294673.203000] ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
[4294673.204000] Probing IDE interface ide1...
[4294673.998000] hdc: LTN526D, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
[4294674.712000] hdd: LITE-ON LTR-52246S, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
[4294674.766000] ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15
[4294674.778000] hda: max request size: 128KiB
[4294674.806000] hda: 78165360 sectors (40020 MB) w/8192KiB Cache, CHS=65535/16/63, UDMA(100)
[4294674.806000] hda: cache flushes not supported
[4294674.807000] hda: hda1 hda2 hda3 hda4 < hda5 >
[4294674.836000] hdc: ATAPI 52X CD-ROM drive, 120kB Cache, UDMA(33)
[4294674.836000] Uniform CD-ROM driver Revision: 3.20
[4294674.846000] hdd: ATAPI 52X CD-ROM CD-R/RW drive, 2048kB Cache, UDMA(33)

[4294685.949000] hdb: 244736kB, 239/64/32 CHS, 4096 kBps, 512 sector size, 2941 rpm
[4294685.949000] hdb: The disk reports a capacity of 250640384 bytes, but the drive only handles 250609664
[4294685.956000] hdb: The disk reports a capacity of 250640384 bytes, but the drive only handles 250609664
[4294687.026000] hdb4

[4294687.401000] hdb: The disk reports a capacity of 250640384 bytes, but the drive only handles 250609664
[4294687.401000] hdb: hdb4
[4294687.420000] hdb: The disk reports a capacity of 250640384 bytes, but the drive only handles 250609664
[4294687.420000] hdb: hdb4

[4294688.875000] hdb: The disk reports a capacity of 250640384 bytes, but the drive only handles 250609664
[4294688.876000] hdb: hdb4

[4294689.615000] cdrom: open failed.
[4294689.721000] hdb: The disk reports a capacity of 250640384 bytes, but the drive only handles 250609664
[4294689.721000] hdb: hdb4
[4294689.818000] hdb: The disk reports a capacity of 250640384 bytes, but the drive only handles 250609664
[4294689.819000] hdb: hdb4

Maybe udev is missing a point here, did the drive work with other distros?

I have read a little bit about udev (man page) and I am not sure but it appears that my zip drive is not an "actually present device" (quoting man page). I could be quite wrong about that.

The drive has worked absolutely perfectly in LN v2.7, LN v2.8 and LN v2.8.1. The kernel was the 2.4.x series. The drive was detected during installation, configured and mount point was created, it just worked.

Truth be told I was spoiled by the LN distribution. Everything just worked straight -- out of the box. No muss, no fuss.

krp

[benjaminq]

What about:
modprobe ide-floppy

The longterm solution would then be to add:
ide-floppy
to:
/etc/modules

And here seems bo be a nice zip-drive Howto:
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=29441&highlight=iomega+zip

But however, this is annoying, since Zip-drives are quite common and really should be detected and configured right from the start.

Benjamin

[tom_servo]

I have here a machine with an IDE zip 100 drive. The drive would almost work in various ways with different kernels (best it got was to be able to mount, but writes caused terrible corruption, and the disk could not be ejected without reboot). That finally changed with 2.6.16. It now works pretty well. If there isn't a disk in when the computer is booted, udev doesn't create the /dev/hdc4 device (because zip disks usually have all data in partition 4 for some reason). It is easy enough to work around that with "blockdev --rereadpt /dev/hdc". Not ideal, but at least it mounts, read and writes ok, and can even eject (both from the button, and the software eject command) if it is not mounted.


Alain