Hi!
I hate to be the bearer of bad news but those ZipCD CD drives were quite unreliable, so there might be a high chance that your unit is a dud.

Anyways, I may have located a driver for it, I can't confirm if it's the good one (as I do not have any ZipCD) but, please, give it a try, and report back if it works.

It's quite tough to locate drivers for the ZipCD, even on Archive.org...

The marketing on this product really annoyed me at the time. Zip drives are zip drives, and CD-RWs are CD-RWs. Despite having the zip name it had nothing to do with zip drives, and Iomega really shouldn't have bothered in a market was already flooded with cheap CD-RW drives. Maybe these were for targetted at the same kind of people who still used AOL and referred to their system units as "hard drives".

Anonymous Coward wrote:

Zip drives are zip drives, and CD-RWs are CD-RWs. Despite having the zip name it had nothing to do with zip drives

Well, both ZIP floppies and ZIP CDs could be used to store *.ZIP files 😁

More annoying was the fact that all that aggressive marketing was to sell rather poor products, see eg. the famous "click of death" issue in ZIP floppy drives, because they decided to save a penny on some rubber pad, and now...

Vynix wrote:

ZipCD CD drives were quite unreliable

...I think I can see a pattern here.

Yeah, I suspected it would be kaput. That's fair enough.

I want to get a cheap replacement, but is it feasible to replace the bezel so I can keep the snazzy looking one from the ZIP drive? Are cd drives all much the same or do I need a specific form factor to do this?

I would hazard a guess that Iomega did not manufacture that drive. So it's entirely possible, if you found out how them OEM actually was, that it *might* fit another drive in their portfolio. Pulling the bezel from a Sony and trying to fit it on an NEC is likely to end it frustration, though.

Vynix wrote:

Hi! I hate to be the bearer of bad news but those ZipCD CD drives were quite unreliable, so there might be a high chance that yo […]
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Hi!
I hate to be the bearer of bad news but those ZipCD CD drives were quite unreliable, so there might be a high chance that your unit is a dud.

Anyways, I may have located a driver for it, I can't confirm if it's the good one (as I do not have any ZipCD) but, please, give it a try, and report back if it works.

It's quite tough to locate drivers for the ZipCD, even on Archive.org...

Unfortunately these drivers want Windows 95 and refuse to run with 98. Oh well...

I guess you're better off swapping that ZipCD drive for something else for the time being.

I tried looking for Win98 drivers, but no luck yet.

Isn't it a standard ATAPI CD drive?
So, it should read disks without any special software, generic ATAPI CD support in Windows 9x should be enough.
Additional software is only required for recording.

This was my 2nd purchase form my 1st job! (first was a 8 port Netgear switch)
Drive died a week out of warranty, They still replaced it, not sure if that's because I worked at the re seller or not?

Seeing the subject brought back memories, so did your description of the clunks and slow OS!
Yes it's just a standard ATAPI drive so fair to say its dead. Do you really need a burner in PC though? Keep it just for show. It was common to have both a CD-ROM and a CD-RW in the same system. Either to burn CD's on the fly if you were brave (as most ended up as coasters) or to save wear and tear on the burner which were expensive.