First post, by Luca91
Hi all,
I have an Iomega Zip 100 bought by my dad in late 90s. Last time I used it, it was 2002 on an old Pentium 133 with parallel port.
I'd like to try to connect it to a current system, in the attempt to make a dump of these "big floppies".
I was about to buy an USB-TO-PARALLEL adapter, but I've read that I need one with a special chip otherwise it will not work, since it isn't a real parallel port, but rather a SCSI. (Here the source: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/ques … rt-to-modern-pc ).
In general a USB parallel port cable won't work — they are driven by the usblp driver, which supports printer operations but not parport operations. The exception is USS720-based devices, which do expose a parport interface, and should work. It's an old chip, but adapters using it appear to be available to this day.
So, do you know any of these USS720-based cables that will work?
Another important thing: Some of the files on these floppies (if they still works) are infected (I know this for sure from another backup), so if possible I prefer to make these dumps in my linux machine. Since I see that linux kernel drivers are available (from that stackexchange answer) I don't think this is a problem. Please confirm.
Thank you very much,
Luca
