Where Did It Go? A Re-Post

[Mercury Morris]

I want to confirm Gene Poole's post about Fedora 7
(and kernel 2.6.2x) non-support of ATAPI IOMEGA Zip Drives.
Neither Fedora 7's nor kernel.org's kernels recognize the device.

Back in Fedora Core 6 (and kernel 2.6.18), the drive was
/dev/hda (or /dev/hdb, whatever).  But the best Fedora 7
can do is create /dev/sdb, unless the drive actually has
a disk inside.  Then Fedora 7 creates /dev/sdb and /dev/sdb4
(or /dev/sdb1 if you have made your own Linux partition).

I have tried building several 2.6.21.3 kernels, but they all
fail to recognize the drive.  Only the program, sfdisk, can
read anything from the device without generating any error
messages.  The command, sfdisk -l /dev/sdb, prints out
what seems to be one good diagnostic message and a
reasonable partition table.

I did find a solution for Ubuntu users.  You can Google
["mc.mauser" "update-initramfs"] (include the quotes,
omit the brackets), then scroll down to see mc.mauser's code.
This solution is good only for Ubuntu, not Fedora!

What can we do to get the attention of either the kernel
developers and/or the Fedora folks and have them look at
this problem?

Admittedly, these old Zip drives are really obsolete,
given that you can buy 8GB USB flash drives for less
than half the cost of some of the IOMEGA models.  But,
it doesn't seem like the right thing to do to drop
support for a device without some advanced notice,
and surely not by just refusing to recognize it.

-- 
MM