zapped zip drive

[tryit]

Hi

First timer here, so be kind.


I was running an internal newish zip drive in my 700 mhz tower, running windows XP pro, worked well as did the zip 100 I took out.

Having run out of disk I went to my usual supplier who had no new disks left, as I was desparate I bought 3 used disks off him.

One turned out to have some sort of virus?

I put the disk in, got no responce appart from the click of ot going in, having taken it out and putting it in my old dos machine with a 250 zip drive, tried the DIR to see if there was any info on it - message appeared about being not ready, press abort,retry, etc.

I put a good disk of mine in the drive, no problem, I put the disk in my tower, nothing?

I noticed my disk drive started to click twice when I put a disk in, anyway the drive would no longer register on boot up, so I removed the drive and fitted the old zip 100, that also would not work, I put it in my old dos machine and it worked fine.

I put it on top of the tower and run it up, it worked, great I thought, screwed it back in, it would not work, it does not even register on the MY COMPUTER window.

I put it back in the dos machine - now it no longer can be allocated a drive letter!

Luckally I had the TOOLBOX program on the hard disk and after running that, the drive was accesible, though when I re booted, no letter could be allocated - though I could change drive letter to D: and it was there.

I put it back on the tower and got the dos prompt, but no matter what I tried I could not access the drive.

I had a zip cd rom, I tried to run that, it would not autorun, when I started 'install' nothing appeared to happen, when I gave up and tried to turn off the computer, GUEST was still going round and round in circles.

anyway, that is the picture so far, I don't know what to do next, anyone any ideas to sort this problem - or even identify what is going on?

thanks

[johnnyis42]

go into device manager and at the top in the menu bar under view select the "view hidden devices" option. then look through your list of hardware and check to see if you find multiple instances of your zip drive. if so, go ahead and detach the drive from your machine, uninstall the iomega software from the controll panel, and then delete all of the drive's instances from device manager.

after that, reboot and reconnect the drive and reinstall the software.

hopefully someone else has a better suggestion than this, because if multiple instances of the hardware isn't causing it then i'm out of ideas.

good luck!

[tryit]

Hi

Many thanks for that tip.

I got to device manager, selected 'show hidden devices', but there was no reference to zip/iomega at all!

I opened some folders where I thought it might be, but nothing anywhere?

any further suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

[johnnyis42]

ok, well that actually helps give me an idea for somehting else you can try....

make sure the zip drive is plugged in with the ide and power cable. boot up and then go to device manager and right click the computer idon at the top of the tree and click the "scan for hardware changes" option that should come up. see if that will force install the zip drive, reboot and see if it is still there then.

[tryit]

ok, tried that.

zip did not appear anywhere!

I put the 'toolkit' disk in again to see if that would decide to work, it started to run, then an error massage titled 'severe' appeared and the caption read - 'the installation only works for MS win NT ver 3.51'.

On the toolbox disk it says - for Zip and Jaz, support for windows, windows 95, windows NT, apple, mac, IBM, OS/2.

So maybe I must get a driver for the XP pro.

But anyway, the driver should be included in XP pro?

[johnnyis42]

no, you'll have to download it probably. other wise when you ran the scan for hardware changes it would have picked it up.

[sechs]

No driver is necessary for Windows XP. Installing Guest or other drivers may, in fact, make the drive *not* work.

It sounds to me like your drive may have caught the click of death from one of those used disks. Due to the way the click of death damages read heads, it can be "spread" to good drives. The click of death would not give you issues with the device appearing correctly.

It sounds to me as if you caused some other problem trying to diagnose your first. It's possible that you've damaged the drives, cables, or controllers. I'd suggest checking with known good for each of these.

Are the drives SCSI or ATAPI?

[tryit]

Hi

thanks for your input.

the drive is ATAPI.

I did download the latset driver for XP, tried to install it, but again it did not appear under the 'device manager' page.

I did out of curiousity go to start and programs, and the iomega file was there, but did not seem to have any 'toolbox' so I could not start the 'search' file.

the computer still cannot find the zip drive!

I believe the 'bug' is transfered to the drive as it no longer automatically found by the dos machine, though if I use toolkit, it finds it, but it is not shown - (in win 3.1), but if I enter D: on the command line, it is there!?

hope you can advise further

thanks

[sechs]

Windows 3.1 isn't an operating system; it's the DOS version that makes a difference.

In the setup with DOS, are you able to actually access disks, or is it only assigned a drive letter?

[tryit]

Hi

I was sure that I could read from a disk, but just to confirm that I decided to re connect the drive to the old dos machine.

On firing up, the post test was stopped and a message appeared 'Hard Disk Fail (80)'!

So, either some bug has been stored in the zip drive itself, or just by chance the hard disk has decided it don't want to play anymore?

When I get a minute I will replace the hard disk and try again.