I'll try to answer all your questions as best I can. All items are ide. My CD is primary master, ZIp primary slave, CDRW secondary master, no secondary slave. I run two hard drives on a Promise ultra100 card. These would be a master & slave on channel 0. The command I'm using is "mount /dev/hdb4". This works fine when I boot with a disk in the drive. This delivers the no such device error when I boot with no disk in drive. In fact, the first message I see when booting with no disk is "no disk in hdb". Yes, I have file /dev/hdb4. I know Mike mentioned devfs, I see it in the following log. As a newbie I don't have any idea what it is or does. One more clue - I have discovered that if I eject the disk (after starting the machine with a disk in & successfully mounting it) I can not mount it again. I get mount: special device /dev/hdb4 does not exist Here is "mount" with or without disk in at startup: [carl at localhost carl]$ mount /dev/hde9 on / type ext2 (rw) none on /proc type proc (rw) devfs on /dev type devfs (rw) /dev/hde8 on /boot type ext2 (rw) none on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,mode=0620) none on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw) /dev/hde10 on /home type ext2 (rw) /dev/hde1 on /mnt/win_c type vfat (rw,iocharset=iso8859-1,umask=0,codepage=850) /dev/hdf1 on /mnt/win_c2 type vfat (rw,iocharset=iso8859-1,umask=0,codepage=850) /dev/hde5 on /mnt/win_d type vfat (rw,iocharset=iso8859-1,umask=0,codepage=850) /dev/hdf5 on /mnt/win_d2 type vfat (rw,iocharset=iso8859-1,umask=0,codepage=850) /dev/hde6 on /mnt/win_e type vfat (rw,iocharset=iso8859-1,umask=0,codepage=850) /dev/hdf6 on /mnt/win_e2 type vfat (rw,iocharset=iso8859-1,umask=0,codepage=850) /proc/bus/usb on /proc/bus/usb type usbdevfs (rw,devmode=0664,devgid=43) Here is mount with disk in at startup & after mounting hdb4 (zip drive), note last 2 lines: [carl at localhost carl]$ mount /dev/hde9 on / type ext2 (rw) none on /proc type proc (rw) devfs on /dev type devfs (rw) /dev/hde8 on /boot type ext2 (rw) none on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,mode=0620) none on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw) /dev/hde10 on /home type ext2 (rw) /dev/hde1 on /mnt/win_c type vfat (rw,iocharset=iso8859-1,umask=0,codepage=850) /dev/hdf1 on /mnt/win_c2 type vfat (rw,iocharset=iso8859-1,umask=0,codepage=850) /dev/hde5 on /mnt/win_d type vfat (rw,iocharset=iso8859-1,umask=0,codepage=850) /dev/hdf5 on /mnt/win_d2 type vfat (rw,iocharset=iso8859-1,umask=0,codepage=850) /dev/hde6 on /mnt/win_e type vfat (rw,iocharset=iso8859-1,umask=0,codepage=850) /dev/hdf6 on /mnt/win_e2 type vfat (rw,iocharset=iso8859-1,umask=0,codepage=850) /proc/bus/usb on /proc/bus/usb type usbdevfs (rw,devmode=0664,devgid=43) /dev/hdb4 on /mnt/zip type vfat (rw,nosuid,nodev,sync,iocharset=iso8859-1,umask=0,codepage=850,user=carl) I don't see any error messages in "dmesg", here is the part that pertains to the drives. As you can see, it's layed out just as I described it above: hda:Pioneer CD-ROM ATAPI Model DR-744 0102, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive hdb: IOMEGA ZIP 100 ATAPI, ATAPI FLOPPY drive hdc: PLEXTOR CD-R PX-W1210A, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive hde: IC35L040AVER07-0, ATA DISK drive hdf: Maxtor 53073H6, ATA DISK drive ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14 ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15 ide2 at 0x1420-0x1427,0x1416 on irq 10 hde: 80418240 sectors (41174 MB) w/1916KiB Cache, CHS=79780/16/63, UDMA(100) hdf: 60030432 sectors (30736 MB) w/2048KiB Cache, CHS=59554/16/63, UDMA(100) hda: ATAPI 32X CD-ROM drive, 128kB Cache, DMA Uniform CD-ROM driver Revision: 3.12 ide-floppy driver 0.97 hdb: No disk in drive hdb: 98304kB, 96/64/32 CHS, 4096 kBps, 512 sector size, 2941 rpm Partition check: /dev/ide/host2/bus0/target0/lun0: [PTBL] [5005/255/63] p1 p2 < p5 p6 p7 p8 p9 p 10 > /dev/ide/host2/bus0/target1/lun0: [PTBL] [3736/255/63] p1 p2 < p5 p6 > Floppy drive(s): fd0 is 1.44M FDC 0 is a post-1991 82077 ide-floppy driver 0.97 If I run "dmesg" with a disk in drive the line that reads: "hdb: No disk in drive" changes to: "hdb: 98304kB, 196608 blocks, 512 sector size"