trouble mounting a zip drive on parallel port

[David Fleck]

On Fri, 16 Jan 2004, Alex Walker wrote:
> I'm trying to mount a parallel zip drive on FreeBSD 4.8. I did re-configure
> my kernel to include the vpo driver and I get the following message on
> "dmesg":
>
> vpo0: <Iomega VPI0 Parallel to SCSI interface> on
> ppbus0
> vpo0: EPP mode
> vpo0: VP0 error/timeout (5)
> vpo0: VP0 error/timeout (5)
>
> The errors are a little worrying, but it does seem to be seeing the drive.

Don't be too sure about that.  From my experience, what you're seeing here
is acknowledgement that the ppbus recognizes the existence of the vpo
driver, and that it's set for EPP mode.  This is prior to any attempt to
communicate with the zip drive itself.

I got the same error messages when my parallel cable came loose and the
zip was no longer communicating with the driver at all.

Do you get any messages like the following?  (I'm guessing not):

Creating DISK da0
da0 at vpo0 bus 0 target 6 lun 0
da0: <IOMEGA ZIP 100 J.03> Removable Direct Access SCSI-2 device
da0: 96MB (196608 512 byte sectors: 64H 32S/T 96C)


If not, there's no device to mount.

Sorry, I'm no expert on debugging this, I can just tell you my experience.


--
David Fleck
david.fleck at mchsi.com