Warning! Dumb Linux noooooobie!

I have installed Mandrake 9.0 on my Winbook XL2 and have had nothing but trouble with the LS-120 superdisk on the laptop. It will not mount and is completely inaccessable.

I have just about googled myself blind but the solutions I find are never for Mandrake and there is one step left out, or the command is not quite the same, etc.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Could you give a couple more details, first off.. i assume the LS-120 refers to your laptop hard disk. Have you installed Mandrake alone, or is it dual booting with another OS, if so, which one.

Furthermore, if the harddisk is partitioned using NTFS then by default linux will not look at it, you will have to either get the RPM that enables mounting NTFS partitions, or recompile the kernel with NTFS support. Its really not hard to do either, though the first option is the easiest.

The new 2.6.0 kernel supports NTFS read and write, but up until now write support has been experimental. You may want to consider convertin the disk to FAT32, which is fully supported.

You can then mount with something similar to

[code:1] mkdir /mnt/windows
mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/windows -t ntfs -r
[/code:1]


Here is more info:
linux-ntfs.sf.net/
linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/rpm/

Note that this is all because Microsoft is so closed about the NTFS filesystem, they don't want anyone else to be able to use it.

I'm assuming thats what your problem is. If you give me a few more details I might be able to help you out more.

Cheers,

Certainly.

Imation created a drive in competition with the Zip Drives put out by Iomega,. These drives, called LS-120 Superdisks, were backwards compatable with 1.44Mb floppies. The Superdisks hold about 120MBs of information.

For a while, and it may still be going on (I'm not sure,) manufacturers decided to build their laptops with an LS-120 instead of the standard floppy drive we all know. I know Compaq and HP did it quite a bit, and Winbook followed suit.

My dillema is that Mandrake will not utilize the drive as a floppy because it does not use a standard floppy IDE. Instead, it uses a 40 pin IDE like a HDD would. It will not mount the drive, allowing me to use it. I do not have any Superdiskettes, and wish to use it as a floppy disk, but cannot.

As far as the rest of the HDD goes, it is partitioned for two different OSs (98 being the other simply to run a few Win apps) but I haven't loaded Windows yet.

I know that the drive works fine under a Windows environment because 98 is what was running on it when I bought the laptop.

I appreciate your interest and advice.

Aiii ok so I called that one wrong with the NTFS bit.. still lets see how I do the second time around ... here goes :

I've done a bit of research for you, and I have good news -- You can definitely get your drive working ! I'm putting in a few links here for you to check out.

Unfortunately I haven't got the time to put together a full walkthrough for you, but I'm pretty sure you'll be able to work it out. If it doesn't happen then fret not, we'll take it from there and find a solution.

www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/9705.2/0374.html
This shows its available as a default option in the newer kernels, I'm quite sure Mandrake 9.x will have it, though maybe the option is disabled.

web.tampabay.rr.com/webtech/linux-ibmtp600x.htm
Heres a guy who has a notebook and wrote a shell script to get the drive to detect. Not sure if his problem is the same as yours but still.

paulbristow.net/linux/ide-floppy.html
Saving the best for last : This is a project that supports IDE storage under linux, it has drivers and some information specific to the LS-120 and 240 drives. Its basically an IDE floppy device driver. On most sites where people have posted the same problem as yours, someone has replied with this site as the solution.

Get that Linux box up n running soldier !
Cheers,