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