OK, after lots of fooling around this is what I have. Joshua, your script only worked if a disk was in the drive & also only worked once, could not eject & then insert a disk again. However, you led me to this: cd /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target1/lun0 mknod disk b 3 64 mknod part4 b 3 68 ln -s /dev/hdb /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target1/lun0/disk ln -s /dev/hdb4 /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target1/lun0/part4 This works pretty darn good. It is, so far, surviving logout/on & reboots. The only problems are that user desktop config files (KDE) are reverting to the device /mnt/zip instead of /dev/hdb4 when they logout or reboot. The root desktop config file stays unchanged. Also, no eject command is listed when right clicking the root desktop config file. The user desktop config files list eject & operate correctly. Do you think this is some kind of permissions problem? Thanks a ton for everybodies help. I vowed I would make this work. You guys always say, "Linux, you can fix it". >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> What I typed works better in a shell script but it appeared to be ok for you too. So tell me, did it work for you? If it did, put that into a script and run it once on boot. It's a stupid hack for that bug. So here's what you are really doing. (a) create a device node to point to whatever needs pointing to (b) read a bit from the device and throw away the result. It doesn't matter if there is a disc in the drive or not. The point is to do the read. (c) remove that device node. You could write that dd command as: dd if=$FILE bs=1 count=1 >/dev/null 2>&1 to make the errors go away also. Joshua b. Jore Carl, I don't have a devfs linux kernel around to verify this with but here's how I remember doing this. You *don't* create the device node in /dev. Do it in /root or /tmp. The thing is, all you have to do is do some IO and devfs will notice the drive. Here's an idea: FILE=/root/tmp/hd?? mknod $FILE b ? ?? dd if=$FILE of=/dev/null bs=1 count=1 rm $FILE Obviously that does absolutely nothing of any real interest *except* force the system to actually look for something at that device node. You'll notice a matching /dev/hd?? symlink will have just appeared. It's magic. Joshua b. Jore Minneapolis Ward 3, precinct 10 http://www.greentechnologist.org On Tue, 13 Nov 2001, Carl Zeilon wrote: > OK, here is the latest of the zip saga. By issuing "mknod /dev/hdb4 b 3 68" > everything works great! AFAIK there is a problem with devfs & the ide-floppy > module. Nobody on the Mandrake forum seems to know how to make this "stick" > though (I tried adding it to /etc/rc.d/rc.local). All these fixes have to be > rerun after rebooting or just logging out. The best suggestion I heard is > changing the configuration to use the ide-scsi module (just like the old > days). Unfortunately, I wasn't around for those days & don't know how to do > it. Does this sound like a good option? Anybody want to walk me through it? > Thanks