[ale] New Toy: Old Zip Drive

John Mills johnmills at speakeasy.net
Thu Feb 19 09:25:01 EST 2004


ALErs -

A friend gave me one of the old-style, parallel-port external Zip100 
drives which may actually be handy for me.

I want to use in on a Slackware-9.1 laptop. Entering:
 "# insmod parport; insmod ppa" is rewarded with a little buzz of life
from the drive (good news, I assume). What '/dev' file should I mount to
find out if I can find any data on a disk? ("/dev/<something>4" I expect,
if it's like other Zips I've used?)

Also, the mini-howto mentions a conflict with the 'lp' module and 
specifies the 'ppa' module be loaded first. 'lsmod' doesn't list 'lp' as 
loaded. Is this something I need to worry about, and if so, how do I give 
'ppa' an earlier load than [say] adding it to 'rc.local'?

Thanks to the antique collectors for any help here.

 - John Mills
   1884 Ridgewood Dr, NE
   Atlanta, GA 30307-1166
   404.377.2577
   john.m.mills at alum.mit.edu



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