zip drives and linux?

[albert at ccs.neu.edu (Albert Cahalan)]

> anyone using scsi Zip drives and Linux?  I have trouble getting many
> different scsi cards to recognize a zip drive, and I can't get Linux
> to work with a Zip scsi card which DOES work with the Zip drive.

It works great. The trick is that Iomega decided to give the disk
partitions like a hard disk and to use the _fourth_ one. So you
should try /dev/sda4, /dev/sdb4, ...

You also need the card set up right. The Iomega card and the Sound
Blaster SCSI card are both really Adaptec 1520 cards w/o a BIOS.
Linux won't detect the card w/o the BIOS, so you must specify the
IRQ, DMA, and IO port information with a LILO or loadlin.exe option.
Note that the SCSI ID you need is the _card_ ID, not the drive ID.
Set it to 7. I have this in my /etc/lilo.conf:

append="aha152x=0x340,11,7,1"

That is IO port 0x340, IRQ 11, SCSI ID 7, and something about reconnect,
parity, or synchronous transfers. SCSI cards with BIOS should be
autodetected by Linux. Make sure the cable is good and the Zip drive
termination is on.