Zip Drive Anomaly

[Rick Forrister]

On Mon, 29 Jul 2002 11:35:53 -0700
"Condon Thomas A KPWA" <tcondon at kpt.nuwc.navy.mil> wrote:

> 
> Folks,
> 
> I have a 100MB Zip drive on my SuSE8.0 desktop machine connected via a SCSI
> interface.  It works fine when I put in a disk formatted on the Linux
> machine.  But if I put in a disk that was formatted on a Winders machine
> (both Win2K and Win98) it can't mount the disk.  The error message says:
> 
> Unable to mount /dev/sdc1 not a block device
> 
> I have it set up to "auto" type the file system in my /etc/fstab file.  I've
> tried assigning the file system type to msdos and vfat with no change in
> results.  Since I can mount msdos floppies and vfat hard drives, I don't
> understand what I'm doing wrong.

Tom, the usual problem with Zip disks is that, under Windows, they are usually formatted to have 1 partition, partition 4.  For example, if the drive is mounted as /dev/sdc, then you'll probably find that:

mount -t auto /dev/sdc4 /mnt/zip

works.

If you've reformatted for Linux, you may well have created partition 1 (/dev/sdc1) in the process, and thus your problem.

Try doing an "fdisk -l /dev/sdc" and see what partitions & types that reports.

rickf



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