[CLUG] A Linux Newbie.

[Stephen Shortland]

Paul writes:

> I also have a second hdd and a Iomega zipdisk how do I mount or find
> them  in Linux.
> I read a text file I got on the net about mounting the Zipdrive but it
> did not work, it said to mount it as mount -t vfat /dev/sda4
> /mnt/zipdrive but it could not find sda4.

Paul, 

When Linux boots up it prints out information about the devices
connected to the IDE bus. This goes by fairly fast, so you will
probably miss it. However you can 'replay' it by running 'dmesg'.
Somewhere in the output you will see something like this:

hda: Maxtor 90645D3, ATA DISK drive
hdc: CD-ROM CDU701, ATAPI CDROM drive
ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15
hda: Maxtor 90645D3, 6149MB w/512kB Cache, CHS=784/255/63, UDMA
hdc: ATAPI 14X CD-ROM drive, 128kB Cache

This identifies that I have two IDE devices connected - 'hda' a Maxtor
Harddisk and 'hdc' a CD-ROM.

The way IDE devices are mapped is as follows:

	Primary Master		hda
	Primary Slave		hdb
	Secondary Master	hdc
	Secondary Slave		hdd

So the device name depends on how you have your second harddisk and
zip drive connected (I am assuming that your ZIP drive is a standard
internal ATAPI ZIP drive - if it is not, then all bets are off!). Look
at dmesg and identify the device names for your zip and second
harddrive. If, for example, you second HD is hdc, and your ZIP is hdd,
then you can mount them with these commands:
	
	mount -t vfat /dev/hdc1 /mnt/seconddrive
	mount -t vfat /dev/hdd4 /mnt/zipdrive

This assumes that the mount points /mnt/seconddrive and /mnt/zipdrive
already exist. If they do not, then you can create them with mkdir
/mnt/seconddrive etc. Also they can be named anything you want - you
do not have to use these names. Pick something that suits you.
When mounting the harddisk partition I mounted the first primary
partition of the hard disk. If you disk has more than one partition,
you can mount those using hdc2, hdc3, etc.... Also, for some strange
reason, zip drives by default use the fourth primary partition (hence
the /dev/hdd4 above) - I do not know why, it is just the way that they
are!

Once you figure out what you want to mount, and where you want to
mount it, make entried in /etc/fstab (see the man page). This way you
do not have to remember the mount command, and you can have the
partitions auto mounted if you want. 

You might see some mention of using SCSI for accessing the ZIP
drive. This is NOT necessary if you are using a standard internal
ATAPI ZIP drive. The only 'advantage' as far as I know to using the
SCSI emulation is that you can then use the 'eject' command to have
the zip disk ejected! Apart from that, as far as I know it works just
the same as using the ATAPI device directly (using hdd[a-d]). Also to
get the SCSI emulation to work, you will need to re-compile the kernel
- probably not something you want to do right away ;-)

One final word - when the zipo disk is mounted the eject button on the
front panel is disabled (just like the cdrom). Before you can eject
the zip disk you need to un-mount is (umount /dev/hdd4). The eject
button will then work. 

Hope this helps.

Stephen...