well, I sort of found the issue. for some reason the B: drive refuses to show up as long as I have a Zip drive connected. no matter what IDE controller I use or what CD drive I pair it with, whether paired or alone, master or slave if the Zip drive is connected I get no B: drive. I even tried hooking up a parallel port Zip drive and in that instance the Zip drive just doesn't show up.
Do you mean it doesn't show up in Windows?
Have you installed the Iomega drivers?
wrote:Do you mean it doesn't show up in Windows?
Have you installed the Iomega drivers?
Yhea, I'm chalking it up at this point to just the motherboard being weird. The zip drive works fine with or without the Iomega drivers installed. with the drivers installed I just have a few of those utilities and the Icon changes instead of being generic but still no 5 1/4 floppy. only way it seems I can make it show up is if I open the PC case and disconnect the Zip drive. if I do that the 5 1/4 floppy drive shows up and works fine.
here's another bit of weirdness. lets say I have it like it is right now with everything hooked up. I boot up into windows, so I have no 5 1/4 drive showing up but I do have the 3 1/2 as drive A:\ works just fine. now if I restart into MS DOS mode suddenly the 3 1/2 drive is now drive B:\ and there is no A:\ drive detected.
its an ABIT BE6 board. it has a built in ata66 controller that from what i'm reading can act a little weird. apparently it eats up an IRQ and I do have this machine loaded with drives. maybe its taking up to many resources, didn't think that would mess with the floppy drives though. also I never loaded the BIOS to enable the extra the thing anyways so i'm not sure if it would be doing anything.
...just another 'wonderful' feature of the Iomega Zip Drive - possibly the least dependable digital storage medium ever devised...
I dimly recall there is a setting in the Iomega drivers setup that will cause Windows to see the Zip drive either as a removable drive or as a large floppy drive. But it's been a long time and I could well be wrong.
wrote:possibly the least dependable digital storage medium ever devised...
Nahh, it was miles better than the floppy.
yet, I still use my floppies but those infernal zip disks refused to run long ago haha...
I dunno, I kinda agree with Jorpho on that one. 3 1/2 disks suck and I have them die and get corrupted all the time. The drives themselves don't seem much better and I always find dead ones. 5 1/4 ones seem a lot better though as far as reliability at least in my experience. I've never had a ZIP disk or drive fail on me yet though I read the 250mb drives tend to have reliability issues. having a quick and easy 100mb transfer method that works no hassle (usually) on anything from a NEC V20 PC to a win7 machine is just very convenient.
I'll check on the zip iomegaware some more. maybe a different version. I used the one from the Vogons driver library which unfortunately is in German which I can only read a little.
Good to hear you guys had luck with zip drives. They confounded us at work when we were migrating away from floppies to backup our local PC's constant read/write issues, never sure if a backup would really work, and problems using disks on different PC drives. We ended up using floppies to backup current individual jobs until CAD and doc files became too large. By then we had a central tape backup and part of the end-of-day routine was to backup new work to the Server/Tape drive setup...
Let us know what you discover with the Iomegaware. In a way I regret tossing the pile of zip drives/disks since now, with the hobbist's luxury of time and patience, it might be fun to fiddle with stuff again...
just a little update. I had an idea. instead of opening up the PC and disconnecting the ZIP drive every time I wanted to use the 5 1/4 drive I thought what about just adding a simple switch to disconnect the Zip drive if I wanted. keep in mind i'm not handy with soldering to much and i'm no electrician so i looked on ebay and found this.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/111418434096?_trksid= … K%3AMEBIDX%3AIT
I hooked it up but it to the ZIP drive but it does nothing. looking at a pinout the 2 wires that go to the switch are the ground lines so either on or off the switch does absolutely nothing. so for a ZIP drive if I was feeling adventurous and wanted to rewire the switch to be able to connect/disconnect there ZIP drive from the PSU would I wire up the 5 or 12 volt line to the switch?
