ZIP Drive Configuration in Red Hat Linux 6.0

This note describes how to configure the parallel port Iomega ZIP drive on a system running Red Hat Linux 6.0.

Red Hat Linux 6.0 includes a module (driver) for the parallel port Iomega ZIP drive. This ZIP drive is a SCSI device, which uses Iomega's PPA3 protocol. The ppa module is the Linux driver for the Iomega PPA3 parallel port SCSI host adapter. Linux modules are programs that can be loaded into the running kernel to expand the kernel's capabilities.

Before loading the ppa module, you need to add the following lines to /etc/modules.conf:



     alias parport_lowlevel parport_pc
     alias scsi_hostadapter ppa

These alias statements are needed to address dependency requirements between different names and modules.

To load the ppa module, login as root and run



     /sbin/modprobe ppa

The modprobe command loads modules into the running kernel. The insmod (install module) command also loads modules, but I could not get it to load the ppa module.

The ZIP disk can be mounted as a DOS formatted disk (msdos or vfat) or a Linux disk (ext2). The procedures for mounting the ZIP disk as a DOS disk or a Linux disk are described in sections 6.2 and 6.3 of the ZIP Drive Mini-HOWTO. I used these procedures to create the following script files to mount the ZIP disk as a DOS disk (vfat) and to unmount the ZIP disk:



zipmount

    /sbin/modprobe ppa
    mount -t vfat /dev/sda4 /mnt/zip

zipumount

    umount /mnt/zip
    /sbin/rmmod ppa

A DOS formatted ZIP disk has the partition /dev/sda4. My mount point is /mnt/zip instead of /zip. The rmmod command in zipumount unloads the ppa module. I put these script files in /bin. Insert a ZIP disk in your ZIP drive before you execute these script files. You must be root to execute these files.

Lee Thompson, lee49@ix.netcom.com
April 1, 2000