Zip Drive Driver

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Rod Bishop

Member
I retired 15 years ago and moved to south Louisiana. Everything we had went into storage. Last week we finally went through everything and I found about 60 Iomega 100 zip disks and about 30 3.5 floppy disk.

I would like to go over them all to see if any family photos might be stored in the pile of disks. I rebuilt one PC that still had a 3.5 floppy in it. I found dozens of pictures worth keeping.

I already found a VCR tape from Christmas 1988 when every family member was alive and healthly. I transfered the video to DVDs and made those still living a copy.

But I'm stuck on the Iomega 100 zip drive disks. I still have the external zip drive with the orginal epson tool zip disk, and the orginal 3.5 floppy from epson with DOS and windows 3.1 drivers on it, but I can't find a Vista or XP driver so either PC can oen the disks for viewing.

I also have a internal zip drive I put in both PCs but I can't get either pC to see the drive and give the drive a drive letter.

The closest I've come is the internal zip drive with Vista. the PC sees there something there but doesn't see it as a Iomega Zip drive.

I've tried several sites that offer the XP and Vista device drivers but so far none has completed the job. They usually just lock up the PC from a restart and I have to remove the zip drive to get the PC to come back on.

I just want to see what's on the disk and possible save any family memories from the trash can.

Any Ideas on getting a PC to see the Zip drive and assign a drive letter?

Or has time passed me by?

Thanks
 
StrangleHold

StrangleHold

Moderator
Staff member
Doesn't look like there is a Zip driver since XP. Find someone with a old computer with 95/98/2000 or even XP on it.
 
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Rod Bishop

Member
Best I remember, I connected the zip drive in between the old parallel printer port and the printer, so I already had a LPT working with the printer being recognized before I connected the zip drive.

Now all printers are usb so maybe the printer port is not active since no printer is currently inplace for operation at this time.

The zip plugged into the printer port, then the printer plugged into the zip drive.
I'm going to pull out my pc and I think I may have an old printer in the barn I could install.
Also, I connected the internal zip drives by using an external HD connection adapter, I'll open up a xp pc and replace the 3.5 drive and connect the zip to the motherboard and try again.
I'll repost my findings if either works..
 
StrangleHold

StrangleHold

Moderator
Staff member
Rod Bishop said:
The zip plugged into the printer port, then the printer plugged into the zip drive.
Click to expand...

So the Zip is plugged into parallel port. How are you plugging the printer to the Zip drive? Confused. The Zip and printer need to be plugged into different ports. Don't think a parallel port can see 2 different devices.
 
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Rod Bishop

Member
The Old Zip external drive has a printer port on it.

You plug the zip drive cable into the printer port on the pc, and then you plug the old printer cable into the back of the Zip drive.

The idea was great 20-25 years ago before CDs and DVDs were around. I found 5 internal zip drives and one external drive along with all the zip disks and the 3.5 floppy disks.

I found I don't have an old style printer in the barn so tomorrow I'm going to pull another old xp computer from the barn and install an old internal zip drive in the place of a CD drive and see what happens.

Old photos are special to us now that most of our family is gone.

I'll post tomorrow after church..
 
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Rod Bishop

Member
I found an old P3 with xp and a scsi drive. I pulled one cd drive and replaced it with a internal zip drive. This old pc still had a 3.5 floppy and a CDRW and everything works great.
I've been pulling a bunch of black and white photo of my wife's great-grand parents from the 1940s.

It helped to figure out what all that can be done once you post a question on this board and in a sense, talk about a problem with others and that helps one to dig deeper in thought to find a solution to a problem.

I hope anyone else that has the same problem can rely on this board for help.
 
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