There were a few questions posted last week to the inspiron list about how to get a Zip drive running, which I tried to respond to, having just figured it out myself. Since then I had a chance to figure out more precisely what I'd been doing wrong or what I hadn't found in the Zip Drive Howto. For those interested, I've attached my original and revised comments below. And thanks to all who offered me tips in the meantime. As requested, the comments have been forwarded to the maintainer of the Zip Drive Howto. Paul Feehan feehan math.ias.edu Notes on external parallel port Zip drive: ----------------------------------------- Update: January 18, 1999 ------ ---------------- Not all of the steps in my previous notes (see below) were needed. Recompile the kernel, as indicated there, but then just do the following: BIOS: If the Parallel Port is set to PnP OS, change this to either Auto or Enabled (either worked for me). On my machine, the setting Enabled reports: mode = ECP Base I/O address = 378 Interrupt = IRQ 7 DMA channel = DMA 3 This step is important: the Zip drive was not detected with the parallel port BIOS set to PnP OS and the ppa module loaded upon booting up. Running insmod ppa, with the parallel port BIOS set to PnP OS will give the ``device or resource busy'' message. Edit the /etc/rc.d/rc.modules file: Comment out the line /sbin/modprobe lp and uncomment the line /sbin/modprobe ppa if you want the ppa module to be loaded when booting up. Alternatively, if the system has already booted, rmmod lp insmod ppa removes the lp module (if loaded) and loads the ppa module. Either should work. It is not necessary (and caused ppa not to be loaded when I did this) for ppa=0x378 to be added to the /sbin/modprobe ppa line, contrary to the RedHat docs. The RedHat FAQ 9.9 (``Problems with the parallel port zip drive) suggests adding the following line to your /etc/conf.modules file alias scsi_hostadapter ppa but I found it unnecessary on my Slackware 3.6 system. When ppa is loaded, during or after boot, running dmesg shows the Zip drive being detected. It need not have a Zip disk loaded until /zip is actually mounted via (for example) mount -t vfat /dev/sda4 /zip Notes on external parallel port Zip drive: ----------------------------------------- January 13, 1999 ---------------- My setup: Slackware 3.6 (Linux 2.0.35) on a Dell Inspiron 3000 This is a brief account of how you *might* persuade a parallel port Iomega Zip drive to work if you're getting messages like ppa.o: init_module: Device or resource busy when you run insmod ppa or the boot messages reveal that your zip drive is not being detected: scsi: 0 hosts scsi: detected total The ``Zip Drive Mini-HOWTO'' by Kyle Dansie contains a lot of detailed information about setting up the zip drive. Make sure the zip drive contains a disk before asking ppa to detect it. First, run lsmod to see what modules are loaded. I had the lp (parallel port printer) module loaded, which I assumed was giving me the ``device or resource busy'' message. However, running rmmod lp and then retrying insmod ppa still gave the ``device or resource busy'' message. Running cat /proc/interrupts showed that IRQ 7 was not being used. So I recompiled the kernel, making the following changes: SCSI Support: scsi support = y [was = n] scsi disk support = y [was = n] SCSI Low-Level Drivers: Iomega parallel port zip drive scsi support = m [was = n] Character Devices: Parallel printer support = m [no change] Retrying insmod ppa still gave the ``device or resource busy'' message. My BIOS setup had the Parallel Port set to PnP OS. I changed this to Enabled, giving mode = ECP Base I/O address = 378 Interrupt = IRQ 7 DMA channel = DMA 3 I then edited my /etc/rc.d/rc.modules file, commenting out the line /sbin/modprobe lp and uncommenting the line /sbin/modprobe ppa ppa=0x378 [I added ppa=0x378 myself; maybe it's unnecessary.] Finally, per the Red Hat FAQ 9.9 (``Problems with the parallel port zip drive), I added the following line to my /etc/conf.modules file alias scsi_hostadapter ppa Now, I retried insmod ppa, running dmesg to see if anything was detected. This time the zip drive was finally recognized, coming up as /dev/sda4. Everything now worked as ``expected'', with the drive mounted with mount -t vfat /dev/sda4 /zip I haven't tried adding insmod ppa to one of the boot files. I assume this works? Was ALL the above needed? Probably not. If anyone has any better suggestions or if this works for you...