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Iomega ZIP100, autoexec.bat and free memory problem

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First post, by 386SX

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Hi,
I built the power cable for the Iomega ZIP100 parallel external drive found weeks ago and it works with my surprise considering how bad things I read about the "click of death" problem of these drives. At first I thought it suffer that cause with a usual smartphone 5V/1A AC/DC transformer it seems to have that problem but after switching to a powerful 2,5A external power supply the drive now load the floppy.
I found a installation package that has a GUEST application that once loaded it search for the drive, find it and assign it a drive letter, in my case E:. Also it came with SCSI drivers I don't need but also a nice GUI utility in dos that can diagnose the drive and gives the serial number info etc..
Now, I tried loading with LH into the autoexec the file but after that the free conventional memory left from 603kbytes goes down to 533kbytes. I suppose I may have problems with such low memory. How can I use the drive without this problem? Also the time it takes to read the drive and assign the letter is a bit too much for a dos boot (like 5 to 10 seconds). Any solutions?
I'm using both HIMEM and EMM386.
Thanks.

Reply 1 of 2, by Jorpho

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Evidently the driver is not loading high. To provide more information it would be useful to see the rest of your autoexec.bat and config.sys.

You may need to add some switches to your EMM386 line.

Reply 2 of 2, by 386SX

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Jorpho wrote on 2020-07-29, 20:04:

Evidently the driver is not loading high. To provide more information it would be useful to see the rest of your autoexec.bat and config.sys.

You may need to add some switches to your EMM386 line.

Thanks, I'll post them soon cause I don't have any floppy drive on my "modern" PC and they are both quite long to write manually on paper. 😁 I don't know if linux can actually use the Iomega drive I may try to see if it sees the drive and copy both files to a zip floppy or use a Pentium 3 computer to read a floppy and copy them to this computer. 😀

EDIT: I partially solved reading online that the GUEST.EXE file should often be loaded BEFORE the cdrom mscdex.exe cause a problem memory overhead or whatever. In fact that gives me now 595Kbytes left. Still I've not clear if I actually need to load the driver into the config.sys file cause it seems to work even without that or if adding that would actually be better than just loading this application, sort of adding a line like:
devicehigh=c:\iomega\aspippm1.sys /info file=nibble.ilm speed= 1 /info

Anyway I'll post my autoexec and config files I should optimize they are becoming too heavy and with too many lines.

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