Zip drives were actually somewhat speedy if you had a SCSI or ATAPI model. The parallel port versions could be a little slow, but that depended on what kind of mode your parallel port was set for. ECP mode was ideal.

Reliability was a problem though. Stay away from the Zip Plus (hybrid SCSI/parallel model).

Whenever I saw a ZIP drive in a thrift store, I'd use one of my bicycle lights to shine into the drive so I could take a look at the read/write heads, so I kinda avoided buying broken drives that way 😀

Hi,
sorry to dig out this old thread, but iirc, one thing hasn´t been mentioned about ZIPs: jumpering the internal IDE ones (never had a scsi) to "Master/Slave a:" you could boot (if bios worked with them) like a floppy, but with not only a "startdisk", but with a load of diagnose programs and disk utilities (pqmagic, drhard/dos, memtest aso). I even had a diskette with the win95 install files, to put into customers machines without CD...
greetings duncan

Duncan,

As far as I know, booting from ZIP drives is only possible with OS/2 Boot Manager. I can be wrong.

Two more things about ZIP drives, just to make this thread more complete:

1) If you have 1 HDD, 1 CDROM, 1 ZIP ATAPI, the ideal configuration would be:

Primary master:HDD
Primary slave: None
Secondary master: ZIP
Secondary slave: CDROM

Other configurations are either less stable or less compatible.

2) To install ATAPI Zip drive in OS/2 you need to have the following drivers:
DANIATAPI
DANIDASD
DANIS506
They can be found on vogonsdrivers; readme files contain all the needed information.

RacoonRider wrote:

As far as I know, booting from ZIP drives is only possible with OS/2 Boot Manager. I can be wrong.

There are BIOSes that have support for booting from ZIP drives. Look for the Boot Sequence setting and check if there is an option for that.
Just checking the manual for the mainboard of my Celeron box (GA-6VTXE): In "BIOS Features Setup" for "1st / 2nd / 3rd Boot Device" you can select "LS / ZIP A:" making the drive the A: floppy or "ATAPI ZIP C:" to make it the C: drive.
I don't think I ever tried this, though - I think I never used my ZIP drive with that mainboard.
Checking for my previous mainboard (GA-5SG100): In "BIOS Features Setup" the "Boot Sequence" setting can be set to "LS/ZIP,C" to first try to boot from the ZIP drive and than from hard disk. Still I don't remember I used that feature.
I found the advice that you should disable your A: floppy if you intend to boot from the ZIP drive as A:

If that really works it is probably quite useful for checking out old DOS versions. Of course the drive is either too slow or older computer for which it would be sufficient can't boot directly so I wouldn't use this everyday, but a nice feature nonetheless.

idspispopd wrote:

If that really works it is probably quite useful for checking out old DOS versions. Of course the drive is either too slow or older computer for which it would be sufficient can't boot directly so I wouldn't use this everyday, but a nice feature nonetheless.

How about this: Boot Manager on HDD and some DOS version on Zip? That way you can rewrite Zip multiple times and test several DOS versions.

The I don't know if BIOS access (emulation) to the ATAPI (not IDE) ZIP works if you first boot from hard disk. If you want to access the ZIP drive from DOS you need a driver.
Compare booting from CD-ROM or USB flash drive: This works if you have BIOS support, but I don't think you can load a boot manager from hard disk and still boot the USB flash drive.

Never owned a ZIP - did have an Iomega Ditto tape - plus Ditto Dash accelerator.
Kicking myself for not grabbing a very interesting drive, a CD / MO cartridge drive some time back - I forget what the model was

idspispopd wrote:

The I don't know if BIOS access (emulation) to the ATAPI (not IDE) ZIP works if you first boot from hard disk. If you want to access the ZIP drive from DOS you need a driver.
Compare booting from CD-ROM or USB flash drive: This works if you have BIOS support, but I don't think you can load a boot manager from hard disk and still boot the USB flash drive.

On the contrary, I can load boot manager from a hard drive and tell it to boot OS from any partition on any disk.

If you install the Boot Manager, it occupies its own small primary partition (which, however, is not given a drive letter), and that partition is the one marked bootable. This means that the "operating system" loaded by the BIOS is the Boot Manager program. The function of that program is quite simple: it asks you to choose a partition, and then it loads the operating system from that partition. If you have two or more operating systems installed (each on its own partition), you simply have to make sure that each operating system is on the Boot Manager menu. You can customize the Boot Manager menu by running FDISK.

Although the BIOS can only boot a system from a primary partition, the Boot Manager can boot from any partition (and any disk) that you specify. In principle, you could even take an operating system that insists on being on a primary partition, put it on a logical partition instead, and then use the Boot Manager to start it. In practice, what stops you from doing this is the fact that the more primitive operating systems won't let you install them on a non-primary partition in the first place.

I quite like having my external zip drive for use on my Pentium 1 pc. Just wondering, has anyone used an internal Zip Zoom ISA connection expansion card to get the apparently 2-3 times speed increase? I'd pick up a card if it made a decent different in speed... I've got the zip 100 plus model that mentions some scsi stuff in the back but it's plugged into a parallel port.