Got myself a bit of turn-of-the-millennium curiosa: an iomega HipZip. It's a USB PocketZip drive (for 40MB PocketZip disks) with built-in mp3 player. They originally wanted to call it the ClickZip, then the "click of death" became a thing and their marketing decided on a name change.

According to it's Wikipedia page it should be detected as a standard mass storage device.

In practice, the USB drive is a standard mass storage device, so it will also work on any modern operating system which can use such devices, including Windows XP, Vista and 7, Mac OS X and Linux.[5] The PC Card drive, similarly, is a standard removable ATA device, so it also will typically function without any problems on modern operating systems including Windows XP. The problem on the latest operating systems is unavailability or incompatibility of the software used to operate the proprietary features of the drive, such as low-level formatting and the software write protection.

The drive mechanism is basically a PCMCIA PocketZip module with a flatcable to the LCD PCB in place of where the PCMCIA connector would have been.

I received it new in box, but 'new' obviously means it's been knocking around some storage for a quarter of a century. When I opened the box this was the condition:
- battery obviously completely dead
- with the charger cable turned inserted, I could turn it on.
- it doesn't recognize the supplied Zip disks, giving an "unknown format" error, and not allowing any further interaction from then on
- if I hook it up to a PC via the supplied USB cable, the HipZip recognizes the connection and shows a data transfer icon in its display, but the PC doesn't detect a USB device (not Windows, not Linux)

First challenge was the battery. It was completely dead and corroded, although it didn't appear to have leaked. Type was a Panasonic CGP345010 which has been out of production for 20 years now. However I found a replacement for a replacement (local parts company's own brand equivalent of the Cowin AHT903450) which was identical (including voltage limiter IC) save for the connectorC. I replaced that and sure enough it now has a working battery.

Unfortunately that hasn't fixed the other two problems. It still doesn't recognize the disks and when I plug it into a PC, it still doesn't register as a USB device (even regardless of any drivers). I can imagine the disks are dead and/or the heads are corroded after all that time, but I'm puzzled by it not appearing at all to the OS, even at the level of an unknown USB device. Anyone have any tips?