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Zip drive (ATAPI 250) access in DOS

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First post, by megatron-uk

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I've added the final piece of hardware to my 386 build; a Zip 250 drive.

It's connected as slave on the primary IDE channel of my bog standard multi-IO card (master is a CF card).

I'm running the Iomega guest tools (v6.0), and it detects the drive fine but won't let me access the assigned drive letter:

The attachment IMG20210517141001.jpg is no longer available

A few other bits of information:

- Lastdrive is set to z:, so plenty of drive letters are free
- The drive takes and ejects disks fine
- The disks themselves are brand new, old stock that I opened within the last month and tested copying files back and forth between my X68000 and USB Zip 250
- The disks are simple, FAT16 formatted
- Disks sound like they are opened and then spun up fine - there's no nasty noises, everything sounds as it should for a normal Zip drive
- There's no pause between doing a dir, or trying to change to the allocated drive letter ; the error is immediate- so it's not as if it is timing out trying to spin up a disk or anything.
- Looking at Norton Sysinfo it doesn't appear as if a device has been assigned after running guest.exe - the only devices listed are A: and C:, despite the message indicating that a new drive letter has been assigned.

What am I missing?

I never accessed Zip drives under DOS back when I had one from new; it was always under Linux.

My collection database and technical wiki:
https://www.target-earth.net

Reply 1 of 5, by maxtherabbit

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maybe it's a 4DOS incompatibility issue?

Reply 2 of 5, by megatron-uk

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Just booted with nothing loaded in config.sys and no 4DOS shell - same thing; detects and 'assigns' to drive D:, but there's no device mapped to D: and nothing showing in Norton to indicate a device has been assigned.

My collection database and technical wiki:
https://www.target-earth.net

Reply 3 of 5, by megatron-uk

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So there seems to be something broken in the last release of the Iomega guest utility for Dos (version 6.0).

I found an older version (v5.4), and doing exactly the same thing I now see:

The attachment IMG20210517155255.jpg is no longer available

... drive detected and assigned a letter successfully, and can change to it.

The attachment IMG20210517155312.jpg is no longer available

... existing disk contents listed correctly.

So, if you have a Zip 250 ATAPI drive and you can't get it working with v6 of the guest utils, try v5.4 instead!

My collection database and technical wiki:
https://www.target-earth.net

Reply 4 of 5, by fgenesis

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I've noticed that the dos 6.0 version also does not support manual drive letter assignment via

guest.exe letter=X

anymore. I like that feature because i: for iomega is nice to have.
Version 4.2 works for me. Attached original SFX archive for your convenience.

Could you post yours or link to where you found it?

EDIT: Does your version also take forever to detect the drive? You can try speeding up the detection by checking which driver file it loads and comment out all other ones in guest.ini. Worked for me for a drive attached via LPT, but unfortunately not for another one attached via IDE.

Reply 5 of 5, by megatron-uk

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fgenesis wrote on 2021-05-17, 16:42:
I've noticed that the dos 6.0 version also does not support manual drive letter assignment via […]
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I've noticed that the dos 6.0 version also does not support manual drive letter assignment via

guest.exe letter=X

anymore. I like that feature because i: for iomega is nice to have.
Version 4.2 works for me. Attached original SFX archive for your convenience.

Could you post yours or link to where you found it?

EDIT: Does your version also take forever to detect the drive? You can try speeding up the detection by checking which driver file it loads and comment out all other ones in guest.ini. Worked for me for a drive attached via LPT, but unfortunately not for another one attached via IDE.

I found the older version of the guest utils here: http://oldcomputer.info/media/zip/index.htm

The drive detection is actually almost instantaneous - of course I have commented out all of the driver types except the atapi one in guest.ini!

My collection database and technical wiki:
https://www.target-earth.net

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