Hi Kevin,
Thanksyou for you reply. While I did not search the archives for this
problem, I feel as though I have read more material in my Linux books and
other documents trying to solve this than I did in the first two years of
college. ;-)
In my experience with technical newsgroups, the criticism most often levied
to those posting is not supplying either enough information or information
not detailed enough to enable others to adequately determine the problem
without a series of more questions. It was my intent to describe the
problem as best I could. Sorry it was so lengthy.
Thankyou for the patches.
Thanks again,
Robert
On Friday 25 October 2002 1:16 pm, you wrote:
> Robert wrote:
> > Hello,
> > I'm reposting this problem, as another maillist person (Russell Coker)
> > made a valiant effort to solve this problem for me, but this has him
> > stumped as well.
> > Well, this all started when I installed the Linux Mandrake 8.2 Upgrade
> > CDROM a month ago. I found out quickly that I could not access my
> > internal IDE 256Mb Zip drive. So I started to read as much as I could
> > find about
>
> Stop! You've gone way, way beyond what was necessary here!
>
> The root of your problem is that in current 2.4.x kernels, if you don't
> have a piece of media in your removable media ATAPI drive (your ZIP drive)
> when you boot the kernel, and you are using devfs, the drive will not show
> up in /dev/discs. Also, if you are using devfsd, no compatibility symlinks
> will be created, since the main entry was not created. Even if you do have
> media in the drive when you boot the kernel, if you later change media the
> kernel will not do a very good job of updating the /dev entries to match
> the new media.
>
> This has been discussed before on this list, I'm surprised you didn't find
> it when you checked the list archives <G>. The simple solution is to wait
> for the 2.4.20 kernel to be released, it should have a patch to make the
> drive appear even without media in it at boot time.
>
> There are also patches on my web site (URL below) for making the media
> change handling better; they have been sent to the 2.4 kernel maintainer,
> but I don't know when they'll get incorporated into the mainline kernel. In
> the interim, you can apply them yourself and get these problems pretty well
> solved.
>
> If you're not up to compiling and installing your own kernel, then you're
> going to have a problem. devfs and ZIP drives don't get along well without
> the patches (which is not devfs' fault, by the way).
>
> http://members.cox.net/kpfleming/ide-floppy has the patches mentioned
> above.
|