Ed, >From what I can understand, after reading about the Zip drive history, it actually has a scsi heritage rather than the atapi heritage of most other IDE devices. Which has always made the jaz and zip drives somewhat problamatic in trying to use them it would seem.
For example, unlike internal CD and DVD drives, which are available no matter which OS you might be using for reading CDs, with Jaz and Zip drives, to be available in pure Dos systems, you need to use special software from Iomega to let the device be seen and usable on your system. Unfortunately, due to issues that seem to consistantly show up, you also needed to go into many motherboard bios setup and change the setting for the IDE "slot" for the jaz/zip drive to show nothing is found at that location - then the dos program will properly work and find the jaz/zip drive on the system, and let it be usable - if you did not change the motherboard bios to nothing in the slot, a number of problems could take place. Even in windows, this became important as well it seems - due to weird issues that would be possible, likewise the motherboard bios showing that nothing was at that location in the IDE location was needed to get things to properly to work. And downloading the software from Iomega's web site, to get the best performance instead of using windows built-in drivers for the jaz/zip drive. For one example (others are possible as well), the built-in windows driver will not work properly to re-format a cart that was originally formated for use on a mac but now to use on a PC (the cart will not have the correct space available after the format is done). To have it happen properly, you have to use the software from Iomega. Jaz drives and then zip drives, which were introduced later, were originally designed to be scsi devices. BUT, due to the changes later intoduced, they were originally internal devices on PCs, and then the USB versions were introduced later. With the new 750 drive showing up only in a USB model, I think Iomega is finally going to go with only USB and Firewire devices in their whole product line, and eliminate the internal IDE versions over a period of time. Unfortunately, there is a much bigger problem that has consistantly shown up with internal Zip drives, that does not exist when compared to USB and Firewire devices. To eliminate problems that keep showing up with internal IDE versions, Iomega tech support would recommend the solution I showed earlier - to go into the bios and change the slot info from zip drive to nothing. This seems to be the ONLY way to stop some weird quirks from showing up. It seems to result from the scsi heritage and then trying to make it seem like a native IDE device. The issues I had with the Promise card and the zip drive do not show up on every system, since a LOT can end up be motherboard bios specific issues it would seem. BUT the problems go back to the scsi heritage of both the Promise card(s) as well as of the jaz/zip drives, and trying to make them look like IDE native units. One thing that I noticed with the Promise card was the LONG time it seemed, when you were booting the whole system, for the Promise card to finally display a message of what was attached to the card, or if nothing was attached to the card. Again, this seems to be a factor of the scsi bios on the Promise card, its initialization and then communicating with the bios you find on PC motherboards it would seem. Ralph Ed wrote: > > Ralph, I just read your message, and since I previously used a Promise > card for about 2-years with my ZIP-250 drive , the latest card is ULTRA 66 > and no problems, I was just curious as to what kind of ZIP problems you were > having when > using the Promise card. I am no longer using my ZIP drive or the > Promise card since I went to an External USB 2.0 HD. > As you mention, the ZIP was always listed as a SCSI device, now I understand > WHY!!! > > Ed -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] ============= PCWorks Mailing List ================= Don't see your post? Check our posting guidelines & make sure you've followed proper posting procedures, http://pcworkers.com/rules.htm Contact list owner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Unsubscribing and other changes: http://pcworkers.com =====================================================
