[PLUG] Resolved: Zip 750 USB 2.0 Linux...

[michael at robinson-west.com]

Maybe power cycling the drive CentOS 7 picked it up.  Windows 10 did too.

I had three thoughts when I got two Zip 750 drives, one Atapi and one USB 2.0.

Thought one, the last zip drive made will not exhibit the click of death,

Thought two, the last Zip drive made will support the smaller media of the previous generations of Zip.

Thought three, 750 mb is close to the size of a typical CD-R (Though the ones I got were 800 meg).

Sadly, thought two on googling Zip 750 is not entirely true.  The Zip 750 can only read 100 MB zip disks.

Does anyone know if thought one, the click of death was resolved, is true or not?

Seems you can still buy new zip disks, even the 100mb variety.  That the 750MB Zip cannot write to 100MB 
disks is a major shortcoming.  The Zip drive was supposed to be in competition with the LS120 to replace the
disk drive.  They both lost, and what we use nowadays is not a disk at all.  We use CD-R's, DVDs. hard drives,
and memory sticks as removable media.  None of these by the way are as easily erased.  I suppose CD-R's are 
readily destroyed though like floppies.  FLoppy disks may not be terribly high capacity and they aren't 
terribly reliable, but you can shred them in a shredder.  Don't try to send a thumb drive through a shredder.

For thumb drives, you have to use software if the data on it is sensitive to render that data inaccessible.
I think I downloaded eraser for Windows XP.  Don't know what the equivalent is in Linux environments.

I had a fourth thought on Zip 750, I thought a zip drive could replace the 1.44megabyte A drive.  In Windows, 
the answer seems to be no.  If you are working with Q-Soft and it is hard coded to write a boot image to A drive,
the zip drive needs to be the A drive.  

Turns out inspecting my Teac floppy drive closer, a pin or two bent and probably broke.  I think I broke the disk change pin.  I have a Sony floppy drive coming, a 34 pin one.  Hopefully, I can format a disk with it without plugging it into USB 2.0 with an adapter.  The problem with Windows 9x is that USB floppy support is buggy and a patch I cannot find is needed to make it work right.  Freedos by the way if you boot from an Atapi Zip drive sees that zip drive as the A drive.  In theory, an industrial computer that supports ATAPI zip could boot from it into Freedos and you could install a real time system.  Freedos could be on an IDE hard drive or a low capacity compact flash card.  Unless you can use a real floppy drive, a 1.44meg one, and then image from a floppy disk to a zip disk...  zip is pointless.  Of course, if you are using a modern multi core computer instead of a Pentium...  you can run Windows 9x in a virtual environment using KVM and give it a disk drive that is in fact a zip disk or a file on a hard disk.  Modern hardware isn't a panacea though, this Tyco machine is ISA based where modern PICMG 1.3 backplanes don't have ISA slots...  so you have to get a PCIe to ISA bridge for the shared memory card and make yourself an ISA slot...  That, or you have to get the source code to Q-Soft so you can once and for all make the old machines work without an ISA shared memory card.  Working around real floppy drives is not trivial in the Tyco QSP-2 system, it's reinventing the wheel.  The peridiem of 20 years ago where you build a system around floppy drives is alien to modern system designers.

With my brother's Tyco system working right now, hope is that that stays true through at least one year of production.  Never fix something that ain't broken, costs too much money.

      -- Michael C. Robinson