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