Just in case anyone is interested. I re-booted (ouch sounds like an OS I used a long time ago) and tried mounting the zip drive. It failed with the same message about /dev/sda4 not being a valid block device. So, I decided to try another zip disk in the drive (these are disks I've had around for awhile and didn't know what was on them), and it worked! I tried the first disk which failed previously and it worked also! So, I really don't know if the reboot was necessary or what really caused it to work, but its working and I'm happy :-) kernel is 2.2.15-4mdk Steve
