... or you can scrap the ZIP idea , install an ISA NIC and use mTCP's ftp server to transfer files between your computers. No more ancient media 😉

yea but i have a big stack of zip disks i wanna actually use;) seems appropriate to me.. surely someone else has done this?

Every one of my machines has a ZIP drive installed. I even have a nice USB ZIP drive for my modern machine for moving files onto ZIP disks for use with my old boxes. It's become a bit of a trademark for my machines to get a ZIP drive installed as part of the build. With around 200 recycled formatted disks in my library, why not?

While I agree with keropi's suggestion of using a network card instead, I believe a Zip drive should work as well - in theory. Unfortunately I haven't tried one in a 386 before, and don't know of anyone that has either. I do have a couple of links that can help though.

Here's an old site that has some very good info about Zip and Jaz drives:

http://pw2.netcom.com/~deepone/zipjaz/index.html

And here is a partial mirror of Iomega's FTP site to download DOS drivers and software:

http://files.mpoli.fi/hardware/HDD/IOMEGA/

This should be enough to get you started. Good luck 😀

I've never had an internal zip drive but I know to use a parallel drive in dos you needed to run a program called guest.exe
It worked really well in the late 90's early 2000's to transfer files onto PC's I would fix for friends and family.

These days I would recommend a gotek floppy emulator. 1 USB can probably hold as many floppy images as you need and no need to load drivers.
(But also get wanting to use hardware just sitting round not being used)

ZIP drives need a driver to be loaded from CONFIG,SYS. I do not remember the specifics right now, but those drivers aren't hard to find. And yeah, just put it as a slave to the HDD.

Btw booting from ZIP drives is another beast, as it requires BIOS support and I doubt the 386 has that.

well macs can boot from SCSI zipdrives.. so maybe a PC could also boot from a SCSI zip?
i hadn't thought to boot from the zip disk tho..

i was just wanting to archive my installation media on zip. rather then feed disk after disk which gets tedious.

the last time i ever had used a zip disk before this i had one disk that had my installation of Windows 95 OSR2.5
that i used over adn over to install win95 on many peoples machines back before windows 98 hit the streets

PCs can boot from SCSI adapters because they have their own option ROM that does it. If the controller's ROM supports booting from ZIP, it will.

Anyway for archiving just get the drivers and load them in CONFIG.SYS. I don't think they even eat up too much conventional memory.

i figured it needed some type of driver installation i was hoping someone would post a link 😉

I have an internal SCSI drive in my 386 and it works fine. I don't see why an IDE version wouldn't work with a controller card that supported it. you can use ZIP drives on everything back to a NEC V20 CPU. At least the parallel port versions work fine on my 4.77mhz NEC v20 machine.

I don't bother with network cards for DOS. seems like to much bother to me and ZIP drives are plenty fast for file transfer to ancient machines.

all you need to run is the GUEST.EXE file and it will assign your ZIP drive a letter if its detected.

@chinny22, keropi: As far as i see, OP wasn't asking for alternatives or suggestions about buying hardware that he clearly doesn't need. He was asking about Zip drive speed in an 386 machine, if was possible this configuration at all.
I don't get why people does this at all. Not only deviates the whole thread, is also annoying.

@OP: Internal SCSI ZIP drives only require drivers if you want to use them as secondary removable drives from inside the OS, and to use extra features, like password protected media, or lock the disks readonly. Extra support isn't required if you use the drive as boot drive, since ZIP drivers report themselves to SCSI BIOS as any other SCSI fixed disk. Ofc, you can't eject disks in such configuration without powering off your PC, but it works.

About being 386 compatible... Well, first ZIP drives came with an ISA card called Iomega ZOOM which was 386 compatble. That card is just a rebranded standard Adaptec SCSI ISA card, so i guess any ISA Adaptec card compatible with 386 will do it, proving that the card has a not so old SCSI BIOS (If you want to boot from your ZIP drive).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkPIj38csz8

Heck, if even an XT can use SCSI drives, for sure an 386 will do it too, and ofc support new drive types, like WORMs, or in this case, ZIP SCSI drives.

hyoenmadan wrote:

@chinny22, keropi: As far as i see, OP wasn't asking for alternatives or suggestions about buying hardware that he clearly doesn't need. He was asking about Zip drive speed in an 386 machine, if was possible this configuration at all.
I don't get why people does this at all. Not only deviates the whole thread, is also annoying.

ChrisNova777 mentioned any difference between IDE and SCSI ZIP and that it was 21 years ago since he last used them.
So either he actually already has a stash he never used or he doesn't have anything ZIP related and wants us to tell him whether IDE or SCSI ZIP (or possibly something else) can be used more effectively instead of those tedious floppy disks (he mentions "tedious" instead of "ZIP drive speed" btw).

From that regard, I don't see Keropi and chinny22 doing anything particularly wrong and I don't see it as annoying in this case either, both their replies aren't straying very far and both are very short anyway. I do agree with you about the way how some people do what you describe and how that can be annoying, but in this case I don't think it's really that bad 😜

But anyway, apparently ChrisNova still has tons of ZIP disks he wants to go use (dunno how tall his stack of ZIP drives is btw, they won't get more common now as time progresses), I've also used the parallel one (a 250MB, but with mostly 100MB disks I got for cheaps) in the past from roughly early 2000's to some years later when I started using USB ZIP 250 and USB drives instead for file transfer as those were easier to use. It's a LOT easier than it is to use stacks of floppy disks. I still remember how tedious it was to use those, the formatting, the doubling (using 2 floppies with identical data to transfer files in case one floppy disks craps out) and the labeling 🤣
If he still needs the drives, I'd recommend him getting either any he can find (remember many might be defective due to the CoD) or concentrate on finding the drives he intends to use. This is what I noticed (in The Netherlands though) 100MB internal IDE drives were the most common ones around, 250MB internal IDE ones were also quite common. Any internal SCSI ones were a lot harder to find, but partially because the seller wouldn't even know it was SCSI. External ones were mostly 100MB or 250MB. Anything 750MB was always hard to find, but I reckon the USB ones were more common and I wouldn't recommend using those exclusively, mostly because it's hard to find any spares.

I've tried LS-120 also, I mostly remember how slow it was but LS-120 works with standard floppies also but I reckon those are a bit more useful in case a floppy controller appears to be dead, for this LS-120 worked perfectly fine in one of my own retro rigs.

Anyway, if ChrisNova wants ZIP-convenience, I'd say the parallel one would be easiest as he's need only one and perhaps a couple spares 😀

chrisNova777 wrote:

i figured it needed some type of driver installation i was hoping someone would post a link 😉

JayCeeBee64 wrote:

....And here is a partial mirror of Iomega's FTP site to download DOS drivers and software:

http://files.mpoli.fi/hardware/HDD/IOMEGA/

This should be enough to get you started. Good luck 😀

With an IDE zip (or parallel for that matter) you can just edit run guest.exe from the command line when needed. That will assign it a drive letter and you can swap disks, etc. as normal. Edit guest.ini and rem out all the drive modes you don't need for faster loading. Nothing to set up in the autoexec.bat/config.sys, no memory used unless you actually *need* the drive. It's pretty good that way.

I'm a big fan of Zip disks. I bought a new Zip 100 SCSI external drive back in 1996 or 1997 when they were fairly new for use on an OS/2 system. Here is a collection of random notes/experience gathered over the years.

Parallel port models: These need an 80286 or better to run the standard Zip software (GUEST.EXE). However, a NEC V20 has enough of the extra instructions implemented needed to work. Even so, these drivers require quite a bit of memory.

There was a 3rd party driver called PalmZip that ran on an 8088 and used quite a bit less memory. I think it was originally designed for an Atari portable machine, but it worked well on any DOS machine including my PCjr. For years I used a boot disk to load the drivers, allowing me to have a Zip drive load as C:, in effect giving me a hard disk. (100MB of storage was great compared to the single 360KB floppy drive that I had, even if it was parallel port attached.) It is paid software, but well worth the money - 8 Euros at the moment. See http://leute.server.de/peichl/palmzipe.htm for details.

If you use a parallel port model be sure to have a bi-directional parallel port. Without that, writes are faster than reads, which is not terribly useful. Older PC and PCjr printer ports are easy to modify.

SCSI models: These are beautiful. All of my older machines are SCSI capable, either with an 8 bit SCSI card or with a parallel port to SCSI adapter. On an 8088 class system with a good parallel port to SCSI adapter I was getting around 50KB/sec reads and writes. With a real SCSI adapter it is much faster. And as a bonus, you can move the drive around easily.

On my original SCSI Zip drive I could tell the Buslogic SCSI controller to boot from the SCSI ID that I had set the drive to. That gave me the ability to run Win 95 from a Zip disk. The SCSI controller BIOS handled everything.

You can run these with pretty much any SCSI controller. I preferred the Adaptec removable storage driver to the Iomega one.

After a few years I discovered the joy of networking, which drastically reduced by need to shuffle floppies or Zip disks around. And eventually I grafted an XT-IDE onto my PCjr, giving me a real hard drive. (That morphed into the jrIDE project.)

Just to clear something up: The common Zip drives are ATAPI (like CD-ROM-drives), not IDE.
The difference does matter because there are also early Zip models which are indeed IDE. (It's possible that those were only used in OEM machines.) That means the drive/disk appears as a HDD to the computer, you can boot from it, you don't need drivers etc.
Of course there are disadvantages, that's why IOMega didn't keep it that way. I think you could get into trouble with those when you tried switching disks. But for retro purposes such a drive might still be desirable. Unfortunately I don't know how to spot such drives.

A ZIP100 ATAPI works fine in a 386 System.
But the ZIP100 ATAPI Drives have Problems with Dust and oxyd, and you can't clean them proper.
I had already 3 of them i put into trash..
but my external lpt zip works perfect.
Looks like the earlier one's are more robust. So the perfect Choice would be a SCSI External ZIP Drive.

idspispopd wrote:

Just to clear something up: The common Zip drives are ATAPI (like CD-ROM-drives), not IDE.
The difference does matter because there are also early Zip models which are indeed IDE. (It's possible that those were only used in OEM machines.) That means the drive/disk appears as a HDD to the computer, you can boot from it, you don't need drivers etc.
Of course there are disadvantages, that's why IOMega didn't keep it that way. I think you could get into trouble with those when you tried switching disks. But for retro purposes such a drive might still be desirable. Unfortunately I don't know how to spot such drives.

Wow...cheers for clearing this up! 😁

I always knew about ZIP (and CDROM drives also) being ATAPI, but I always thought this was just a standard, kinda like ATA-33 and PIO was. And these all fit the same 40p connector on the boards I've used in the past anyway.

I don't know how to spot them (the real IDE ZIP drives) but if what you say is true, it should be the earliest models and iirc internal ZIP drives actually had "ATAPI" written on the drive (possibly part of the model number even).

Taken from here: http://pw2.netcom.com/~deepone/zipjaz/atapi.html

There are at least four different kinds of IDE Zip drives - the original ATA version, the ATAPI version which replaced it, an AT […]
Show full quote

There are at least four different kinds of IDE Zip drives - the original ATA version, the ATAPI version which replaced it, an ATAPI2 version which seems to have replaced the original ATAPI Zip, and an ATAPI3 version which will probably replace the ATAPI2 . The various types of IDE Zip drives can be differentiated in the following ways:

The ATA Zip has a separate access light and eject button in addition to a manual eject hook on the front of the drive. All ATAPI Zip's have an eject button which doubles as the access light, and they lack the manual eject hook (they have a hole in the back of the drive for this purpose, so you would have to open up the computer to use it).

The firmware revisions for the ATA Zip are in the form of B.29 (letter before number). For the ATAPI Zip drives, they should be in the form of 23.D or 14.A (number before letter). In Windows 9x, the firmware revision can be found on the Properties/Settings tab for the Zip drive in the Disk drives section of Device Manager.

To identify an ATAPI2 or ATAPI3 Zip drive, view the label on top of the drive. Beneath the diagram of jumper settings, you should see a part number which begins with P/N. Following that number, it will say ATAPI2 or ATAPI3 if it is one (and if it's an ATAPI2, it may not show all of the available jumper settings on that diagram).

Note that different types of IDE Zip drives use different jumper settings, so it's important to know which type you have.

My experience is with the ATAPI drives, but I think most of this information would also apply to the older ATA drive.

I think you can download the manuals for the original ATAPI Zip drive from Iomega.

The manuals for the ATA Zip seem to have been removed from Iomega's website. I think the main difference in configuration is the jumper settings, so I've included the relevant illustration from Iomega's PDF file here.

The ATAPI2 Zip has some special configuration issues - especially when it's set for drive A: mode. You can find some ATAPI2-specific information here.

I'm told that the ATAPI3 Zip no longer supports drive A: mode as the ATAPI2 model did. Apparently, Iomega decided that it was more trouble than it was worth.

EDIT: Here's a label pic from one of my two IDE Zip drives.

This confirms it's an ATAPI2 drive (the other one is pretty much the same).