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Benedict Chong's Z-pA

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First post, by delsydebothom

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I've gotten a hold of a utility called Z-pA, which runs from the master boot record, and checks to see if you have a Zip disk in your IDE Zip drive. If so, it makes it A:, and thus bootable. I think it is really nifty, but it was commercial software, and the unregistered version that can be acquired via the Wayback Machine (https://web.archive.org/web/19990424094515if_ … bin/ZPA099E.ZIP) is time-limited. Unfortunately, the website that used to provide it appears to belong to an entirely different company now. Has anyone here ever tried this, or maybe even used it on a regular basis? Almost certainly there's no way to register it nowadays, but if I'm wrong about that I'd be very pleased indeed. I don't know, maybe there's a better way nowadays to get the same functionality, but this just seems really neat to me.

Parenthetical added in retrospect: would this have been better classified as a hardware topic?

Reply 1 of 2, by doshea

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I assume that Z-pA was a workaround for the BIOS not supporting the Zip drive natively? I ask since I seem to recall seeing BIOSes where you could pick a Zip drive as one of the boot options, or maybe I'm thinking of LS-120, I'm not sure.

From what I recall, Plop Boot Manager seems to be popular for enabling people to boot from USB devices when the BIOS doesn't support it, although I haven't tried it myself. Unfortunately I don't see any mention of Zip devices on that page, but I wonder if it could help somehow anyway?

If the Zip disk just shows up as another IDE device, I wonder if any boot loader that lets you boot from another device and swap disk numbers would work? That would probably result in the Zip disk being C: but I imagine that is just as good. I'm pretty sure SYSLINUX can do this (don't worry about the name, it can boot lots of OSes, and you can install it from DOS), and Grub too.

Reply 2 of 2, by delsydebothom

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Actually, making the ZIP the C drive would be even better, at least for what I'm hoping I can do. I have the P3 motherboard on hand that I'll be building into the first real retro tower I've had since the 90s. If the BIOS happens to support booting from ZIP disks, it will diversify the things I can do with it. But the way that directs the conversation also strengthens my suspicion; this was really mostly a hardware topic, not a software one.

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