Adaptive control of a flexible beam system preceded by an unknown dead-zonein the driving motor is investigated in state space form. By introducing an important lemma forsimplifying error equation between the flexible beam model and the matching reference model, arobust adaptive control scheme is developed by involving the dead-zone inverse terms. The newadaptive control law ensures global stability of the entire system and achieves desired trackingprecision even when the slopes of the dead-zone are not equal. Simulations performed on a typicalflexible beam system illustrate and clarify the validity of this approach.