Device for parallel port zip drive?

[Tim Chase]

> I'm trying to use an old parallel port Zip drive on Fedora 2. I 
> downloaded the IOmegaware file for Linux from iOmega 

I'm not sure what the IOmegaware file has to do with anything. 
According to the ZIP-drive HOW-TO, it's just a matter of loading 
standard modules in the right order (namely, before the 
parallel-port module gets loaded)

You can read more at
http://en.tldp.org/HOWTO/ZIP-Drive-4.html#ss4.1

My understanding from the docs is that if you have the ZIP drive 
attached at boot time, and your modules probe the "ppa" module 
before the "lp" module, you should have a "sda0" device which you 
can mount like any other drive.  Granted, the drive may not be 
"a" if you have other SCSI devices on your system

> My previous computer had a builtin Zip drive that worked fine, and my 
> home machine has an external SCSI zip drive that worked fine on FC2.

I think the internal varieties (last I checked...I stripped my 
internal out of the machine in which I had one) show up as a 
standard IDE drive, and thus as simply /dev/hdb or /dev/hdc or 
/dev/hdd depending on where it landed in your IDE chain (I've 
even booted with it as the master device on the primary IDE, 
making it /dev/hda).

It should then have a fairly standard partition table, which you 
can view with fdisk, which should allow you to mount particular 
partitions, or even repartition it as you desire.

While you can't boot off a parallel-port ZIP drive, you can boot 
from a floppy (or CD if you want) which will load the 
parallel-port ZIP module, and then proceed to boot from that.

If all goes properly, you should have a device which exposes 
itself as either an IDE drive (/dev/hdXY) or SCSI drive 
(/dev/sdXY) which you can then mount with the usual "mount" 
command like

	bash> mount /dev/sda0 /mnt/zip

It should autodetect the type of filesystem (usually VFAT), but 
you can bung with that and change it to your favorite if you 
like, using fdisk/cfdisk and your favorite flavor of mkfs 
assuming you don't need to use the disk in Dos/Win32 systems.

HTH,

-tim