First post, by FFXIhealer
Holy crap, it works.
STORY:
So my first experience with an Iomega Zip drive was the blue/purple, big, blocky, Parallel Port, external drive. I distinctly remember attaching the Zip drive to the computer's parallel port, a flat-bed document scanner to the Zip drive's pass-through port, and then finally an old injet printer to the scanner's pass-through port. I had 3 devices daisy-chained off of the same port on my family's Packard Bell computer. The specs aren't super important, but it was a Pentium 1 and it ran Windows 95. 100MB of storage seemed MASSIVE when the entire hard drive was 1.6 GB in size.
That drive disappeared from non-use. When I upgraded to my Windows 98 gaming rig in 1999, I built it with an internal ATAPI Zip Drive. The external drive spent decades in boxes.
I found it about a month ago still connected to its parallel cable and then found the power supply for it a few days later. I got excited.
I pulled out my current Pentium 1 system, also running Windows 95, pulled out my ORIGINAL Zip Drive install floppy....and nothing. The program couldn't see the Zip drive, no matter what. So I started looking harder into Windows 95. The IDE channels both had yellow exclamation points on them, I couldn't see the CD-ROM drive no matter what I did, etc. I tried to fix those drivers and ended up making Windows 95 unbootable. Great, right?
Lucky for me, I had copied the /Win95 folder from the install to the C drive, so all I needed to do was delete the Windows folder after using a Windows 98 boot floppy (I created a new one on my Win98 gaming rig). Easier said than done. In DOS, I kept running into permission errors and hidden files and folders. I spent over and hour today changing individual file permissions and deleting everything and removing all the directories one by one until C:\Windows was gone.
Then I ran C:\Win95\setup.exe. Like magic, everything installed and is now magically working properly again. CD-ROM works (although CD-Rs are sometimes iffy to read from), sound works, ATI Rage IIc works, Diamond Monster 3D Voodoo1 works, the whole thing.
So then it occurs to me.....what if Windows was having all the problems from the beginning? So I plug up my Zip drive, try the install floppy again and BAM! E: drive listed. I can read from the disks.
PROBLEM:
I can't find the "TOOLS" disk to save my life, and even if I did find it, I'm pretty sure I reformatted the disk back in the day. I have 5 Zip disks right now, all but one is completely empty and the last one only has one file on it. I have internal Zip disks in my Win98 system and my AMD Athlon XP Windows XP system, so it makes moving files a bit easier...besides it's fun to play with all this old stuff. I'm amazed it still works.
ANYONE know where I can get whatever was on that TOOLS disk so I can recreate it on another ZIP disk?
