Thanks for the tip. I'll do some reading and try again. I'm glad someone confirmed what I thought about the supermount feature (busted). I knew something had changed in 8.1. Accessing my removable media devices is much easier except for the #@*%$ zip. This must be the devfs feature. Sorry Florin, your strace tip is a little over my head :-\ I'll get back to this later. Thanks everybody. At 02:33 AM 11/13/2001, you wrote: >On Saturday 10 November 2001 10:40 pm, you wrote: > > I'll try to answer all your questions as best I can. > >I had a USB Zip 250 and Mandrake 8.1 and it responded with pretty much >exactly the same errors. Although I have since removed it from my system, >you can find a fair amount of info and discussion concerning this problem on >the Mandrake User board under "Hardware". Since implementing devfs many >people experience problems with USB devices. I previously ran Mandrake 8.0 >with "supermount" and had no problems with my USB devices. There is a devfs >writeup on the Mandrake Forum page. This info should be pertinent regardless >of the distro you using. > >Devfs provides another method of supplying the character and block special >devices that form the /dev directory. This is a kernel space device manager. > There is also a user space portion called devfsd for user overrides. Most >distro's are not utilizing devfs as default. Mandrake 8.1 is the first, I >think. Also, supermount is currently broken in 8.1, and by default in >disabled (but should be fixed soon). > >Beyond that, I don't know much more...