Internal IDE Zip Drive Setup

From Linuxhelp Wiki

Author:	Joey
Created On:	September 20th, 2002
Updated On:	Unknown

I just bought an Internal IDE Zip Drive and thought I would share with you how I got it working. Now I know alot of you have External or SCSI Zip drives, but I am familliar with the Internal IDE one right now.

It's fairly simple, if you have one hard drive and one cdrom, make sure you have the hard drive set as master and the cdrom set as slave. Then attach another ide connector cable to the motherboard and connect it to the zip drive. Make sure the zip drive is set as master.

Once that is done, restart the machine and you will see it being detected by the bios along with your other drives. Boot into Linux and now you must re-build the kernel with support for it. You do this by doing the following as root: (Please note, you might want to read my Kernel Guide if this is your first time compiling a kernel)

cd /usr/src/linux
make menuconfig

Go into the Block devices section and make sure you have a * next to this item:

<*>    Include IDE/ATAPI FLOPPY support

Now if you already have a * there, then skip down to the final section. If not then follow these steps:

Exit menuconfig and choose to save the new kernel, then type:

make dep

make clean

make bzImage

make modules

make modules_install

cp System.map /boot/System.map-2.2.x

cp arch/i386/boot/bzImage /boot/vmlinuz-2.2.x

/sbin/lilo

And then reboot. As the new kernel loads you should see something like this:

hdc: IOMEGA ZIP 100 ATAPI, ATAPI FLOPPY drive

If you see that, then great, everything seems to be working. Now you must create a directory to mount it to, mkdir /zip works nicely. And finally all you have to do is treat it like a floppy drive, when you want to access it, just mount it using mount /dev/hdc4 /zip and the device should show up when you type df. It will probably be similar to this:

/dev/hdc4      95167  46390  43863  51%  /zip

If all goes well, this should help you get your IDE Internal Zip Drive working.