How to make Iomega zip disks work

Q I've installed SUSE 9.2. However, I've had to revert to 9.1 as I couldn't get my Zip drive to run on 9.2 - the Iomega Zip drive wasn't even identified. I give below the entries I made in /etc/fstab:

/dev/hdb
hdb4 /media/zip subfs auto auto noauto,fs=floppyfss
{nothing},procuid,exec, user nouser,dev\nodev,rw

I think you'll agree I tried all reasonable combinations. Some of them merely echoed SUSE's entries for /dev/fd0 (floppy disk). I liked everything else about 9.2 and so am disappointed not to be able to use it, but my Zip disks are my main archive at the moment, and contain a lot of data. Thanks for your time and attention! I do hope you can help.

A You should start by verifying that the Zip drive actually exists by running dmesg. This will output a whole slew of information, which should hopefully include IDE devices located during the boot process Assuming the device really exists on /dev/hdb, you need to mount /dev/hdb4, which can be done manually with the following:

mount --t vfat /dev/hdb4 /media/zip

If this fails to mount the Zip drive, the error output should indicate what causes the problem fairly quickly. Should it work, you can add it to fstab with the following:

/dev/hbd4 /media/zip auto  defaults 0              0

You can then manually mount the device with the command:

mount /media/zip

Good luck!

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