[vox-tech] ZIP drive woes

[Rod Roark]

Well, "unable to read partition table" sounds pretty bad.

But for what it's worth, zip disks are generally formatted as fat on
partition 4 (/dev/?da4).

-- Rod
   http://www.sunsetsystems.com/

nbs said:
> I found some old ZIP disks I had backed up some of my websites on, and thought I'd
> poke around and see what I had.
>
> Unfortunately, when I went to use my drive (an older, PPA-style 100MB drive), I was
> faced with the following:
>
>  # insmod ppa
>  Using /lib/modules/2.2.18pre21/scsi/ppa.o
>  ppa: Version 2.05 (for Linux 2.2.x)
>  ppa: Found device at ID 6, Attempting to use EPP 32 bit
>  ppa: Found device at ID 6, Attempting to use SPP
>  ppa: Communication established with ID 6 using SPP
>  scsi2 : Iomega VPI0 (ppa) interface
>  scsi : 2 hosts.
>    Vendor: IOMEGA    Model: ZIP 100           Rev: J.03
>    Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 02
>  Detected scsi removable disk sda at scsi2, channel 0, id 6, lun 0 sda : READ
>  CAPACITY failed.
>  sda : status = 0, message = 00, host = 0, driver = 08
>  sda : extended sense code = 6
>  sda : block size assumed to be 512 bytes, disk size 1GB.
>  sda: test WP failed, assume Write Protected
>   unable to read partition table
>
>
> The ppa module remains loaded, but whenever I try to mount a disk, it fails too:
>
>  $ mount /mnt/zip              [ in fstab, it's /dev/sda1 as ext2 fs ] sda : READ
>  CAPACITY failed.
>  sda : status = 0, message = 00, host = 0, driver = 08
>  sda : extended sense code = 6
>  sda : block size assumed to be 512 bytes, disk size 1GB.
>  sda: test WP failed, assume Write Protected
>   unable to read partition table
>  mount: block device /dev/sda1 is write-protected, mounting read-only sda : READ
>  CAPACITY failed.
>  sda : status = 0, message = 00, host = 0, driver = 08
>  sda : extended sense code = 6
>  sda : block size assumed to be 512 bytes, disk size 1GB.
>  sda: test WP failed, assume Write Protected
>   unable to read partition table
>  mount: /dev/sda1 is not a valid block device
>
>
> I tried mounting them as DOS disks, too (/dev/sda4 as vfat fs),
> and I was sure that the "lp" kernel module was disabled before
> I tried doing the "insmod ppa".
>
>
> Could it be that my dusty old Iomega drive has finally kicked the
> bit bucket?
>
> Or perhaps all four of the disks I'm trying to read are dead!?
> (I know one of them worked fairly recently... I believe it was the disk I tested the
> Zip drive on when I put this P133 system back together)
>
> FYI I'm running Debian 2.2 and kernel 2.2.18pre21, which came with it. I didn't build
> the kernel on this box.  Looking at the kern. config file "/boot/config-2.2.18pre21",
> I'm not sure there's any point in doing so:
>
>  ...
>  CONFIG_SCSI=y
>  CONFIG_BLK_DEV_SD=y
>  ...
>  CONFIG_SCSI_PPA=m
>  ...
>  CONFIG_PRINTER=m
>  ...
>
> Any ideas?  Or should I go hunt down a new drive?
>
>
> -bill!