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Title: Handling ZIP-discettes

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Handling ZIP-discettes

Request:

You want to use a ZIP-drive with ZIP discettes in your system. We will assume in the following explanation that your ZIP-drive is known as /dev/sdb to your system.

Procedure:

ZIP discettes that come directly from your dealer are usually already partitioned and contain a MS-DOS filesystem. In order to achieve a better performance and handling under Linux it is useful to use the ext2 filesystem.

Funny enough, these discettes are partioned in a way that the primary partition with ID 4 is used for the filesystem (I.e. in our example this is /dev/sdb4). Nobody would expect this. However, you can use this situation to perform a simple "automatic" detection of the filesystem type.

The following predefinition is used :

  1. If a ZIP-discette should be used with a MS-DOS filesystem, the latter should be contained on the 4th. primary partition.

  2. If a ZIP-discette should be used with the ext2 filesystem, it should be contained on the 1. primary partition.

The partitions on the ZIP discette are created with fdisk (or with YaST). It is not necessary to reboot after the creation of the partitions on the ZIP discette. Then the Linux-filesystem ext2 is created using the following command :

mke2fs /dev/sdb1
A distinction according to the position of the partitions has the advantage, that it is possible to create and specify different mountpoints for the two filesystems. An automatic mount of the correct filesystem is then possible there.

To achieve this the following entry in /etc/fstab is necessary :

/dev/sdb1   /zip    ext2   rw,user,noauto,exec
/dev/sdb4   /dzip   msdos  rw,user,noauto,exec,umask=000

You still have to create the mountpoints :

mkdir /zip
mkdir /dzip
Then you can simply say
mount /zip
or
mount /dzip

If a discette is prepared according to the rules given above, performing the mount-command will reveal whether it is a MSDOS- or a Linux-discette : If an error occurs, it is the wrong filesystem ... B-|
It is then also possible to determine from the mountpoint, which filesystem was mounted.

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Keywords: ZIP-DRIVE, PPA, DISCETTE, PARTITIONING, FORMATTING, MKFS, MKE2FS

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Feedback welcome: Send Mail to rb@suse.de (Please give the following subject: SDB-maddin_zip)

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SDB-maddin_zip, Copyright SuSE GmbH, Nuremberg, Germany - Version: 10. Mar 1998
Impressum - Last generated: 24. Feb 1999 15:13:25 by maddin with sdb_gen 1.00.0