>>>>>> On Sun, 26 Nov 1995, Roland McGrath <roland@frob.com> writes:

>As you've already heard, this is standard DOS formatting.  I guess that it 
>is because of the MBR/partition table, though I'm not really sure why.

	The ZIP drive is handled as a removeable drive, so there is no
"partition table" as such, the filesystem just "begins" at the beginning
of the drive. (You are correct, the MSDOS filesystem begins later than sector
zero on a floppy, but as I understand it that situation is just special-cased
with fstype "msdos" and a "/dev/fd*" device.)

As I've said before, you can mount a DOS disk using

	mount -t msdos /dev/sd2d /zip

w/o needing a disklabel (just like a floppy, not counting the partition letter
difference, but then again, that's an "fd" special-case). 

>[And I guess 96/64/32 is the conventional geometry, even though I know 
>there are only 2 heads in there...]

	Even win95 uses this geometry (the zip drive internally translates
the geometry).

>What I wanted to ask is if either of you have been able to successfully 
>write to your ZIP disks?

	I use mine extensively, basically daily. Reading and writing, both
MSDOS and FFS partitions, under DOS, win95, and NetBSD.

>                      I finally got mine partitioned, and was able to 
>mount it (with msdos fs), but then I had a nasty SCSI crash and it took out 
>the filesystem on my /usr partition.

	It sounds like you've got some other nasty problems; did you
accidentally mount the wrong "/dev/sd*" device (accessing a remnant of an
old DOS partition on your other drive) and it wrote over an FFS partition
or disklabel? I crashed a disk once due to working with the ZIP drive, but
only because I was stupid and newfs'd sd1a instead of sd2a.

>           So, I've been wondering if there's something funny in the way 
>the ZIP drive interprets SCSI, perhaps together with something in the 
>NetBSD driver for my Adaptec 1520...  What have your experiences been like?

	I'm not familiar with the 1520; but I have had nothing but success
on the 1540A in my DLC/40, my old 1542B, and my new 1542CF with three other
devices attached.

Cheers,
Phil
--
Phil Knaack                    flipk@iastate.edu
Database Programmer, NCREMP    Student Development Group
ISU Extension                  Project Vincent, Iowa State University