> How do you mean "fail to recognize the drive" when you are also saying > you get a /dev/sdb1 created? That sounds like the drive is recognized fine. On my system, I have four Western Digital SATA drives - /sda thru /sdd. When the system boots with no disk in the drive, /dev/sde shows up and all the code, except for sfdisk, sees it as a fifth SATA drive. That is why I claim that the drive is not recognized, at least not correctly. One other point that I didn't mention before: The only way to get the /dev/sde4 created is to boot the system WITH a disk inside the ZIP drive. That was not necessary with Fedora Core 6 and the 2.6.18 kernel(s). The command, mknod /dev/sde4 b 8 68, does not create a valid device. In order to get /dev/sde4 correctly created, there must be a ZIP disk inside the ZIP drive before the system is booted. Below, you can read what sfdisk has to say about the device, correcting the error(s) generated by the kernel (kudzu or whatever). But when an attempt is made to write to the ZIP drive, or even just print out the partition table, hundreds of error messages show up in the system log. I've included only very few of the system log messages, below. ---------- Some of the console output (commands and responses) ---------- [root@estreet ~]# ls -alt /dev/sde* brw-r----- 1 root disk 8, 64 2007-07-28 14:23 /dev/sde brw-r----- 1 root disk 8, 68 2007-07-28 14:23 /dev/sde4 [root@estreet ~]# sfdisk -l /dev/sde Disk /dev/sde: 0 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track Warning: The partition table looks like it was made for C/H/S=*/64/32 (instead of 0/255/63). For this listing I'll assume that geometry. Units = cylinders of 1048576 bytes, blocks of 1024 bytes, counting from 0 Device Boot Start End #cyls #blocks Id System /dev/sde1 0 - 0 0 0 Empty /dev/sde2 0 - 0 0 0 Empty /dev/sde3 0 - 0 0 0 Empty /dev/sde4 * 0+ 95 96- 98288 6 FAT16 [root@estreet ~]# mount /dev/sde4 /mnt mount: you must specify the filesystem type [root@estreet ~]# mount -t vfat /dev/sde4 /mnt mount: /dev/sde4: can't read superblock ---------- Some of the error messages from /var/log/messages ---------- Jul 28 15:02:23 estreet kernel: attempt to access beyond end of device Jul 28 15:02:23 estreet kernel: sde: rw=0, want=196392, limit=1 Jul 28 15:02:23 estreet kernel: printk: 36 messages suppressed. Jul 28 15:02:23 estreet kernel: Buffer I/O error on device sde4, logical block 24544 Jul 28 15:02:23 estreet kernel: attempt to access beyond end of device Jul 28 15:02:23 estreet kernel: sde: rw=0, want=196392, limit=1 Jul 28 15:02:23 estreet kernel: Buffer I/O error on device sde4, logical block 24544 -- MM
