I thank you for your suggestion, but I left my mother's house yesterday evening, and the computer is there. 🙁

If it was doing it on crisp, fresh, new, unused, stored perfectly zip disks then we might have something definite to investigate, but the scandisk part of the process is very related to the condition of the media, and would take a long time on a vintage era system with a well used but perfect shape faster HDD, and a hour or so if I was cleaning up lost clusters and relocating files due to bad blocks. Every time scandisk hits a snag it retests it 6 times I believe so that can be what is taking the time.

I use this to test disks:
https://www.grc.com/tip/clickdeath.htm

If a disk is particularly bad you can avoid hours of tribulations.

Nexxen: I thank you for your advice, but DriveSpace seems to take forever to scan a disk, and I can't seem to disable the scan. 🙁

Harry Potter wrote on 2024-07-31, 12:00:

Nexxen: I thank you for your advice, but DriveSpace seems to take forever to scan a disk, and I can't seem to disable the scan. 🙁

Have you tried to just see if it makes any difference at all?
Science purpose 😀
Anecdote: I used it to test new discs, and got bad results (probably stored incorrectly); worst looking disk was 99% good with minimal relocation.

I hope you'll solve this issue soon.

If I can find the IDE Zip100 drive at my mother's house, I might be able to install it, and the hour might be less than a half hour, but first, I have to see if it's compatible, and then, I have to get it installed. I'm wary about installing it myself, as, while I'm familiar with the software, i.e. I can handle things such as FDISK, FORMAT and even the CMOS settings, I don't know if I can install the hardware. I probably can, though; I'm just worried about making a mistake. BTW, FDISK and such are examples: I know that, other than CMOS, they are not involved with this particular type of drive.