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3. The ZIP drive

There are at least five or six versions of the Iomega ZIP 100 drive. They all accept special cartridges resembling a 3.5" floppy disk that hold 100 megabytes of data. The disks actually hold 96 cylinders of 2048 sectors each holding 512 bytes. This would normally be called 96 Megabytes.

The external drive comes in these types:

The internal drive comes in these types:

The internal versions can be mounted in 3.5 or 5.25 drive slots. The external versions are in a small blue plastic case enclosure, powered by an external wall brick.

All the drives have a large pushbutton on the front of the drive. This is used to eject the disk. Linux locks the door while using the drive, but if the button is pressed while the door is locked, the ZIP drive will remember and eject the disk as soon as the software unlocks it.

3.1 Parallel port version

The parallel port ZIP drive has two DB25 connectors, the male (DB25M) should be connected with the supplied parallel cable to your computer's parallel port. The other (female, DB25F) is intended to support a chained printer. Linux 2.0.x does not currently support simultaneous use of both a ZIP drive and a chained printer. A work- around is possible using loadable modules. There are no configuration switches. This will likely change in future versions. Check the Linux Parallel Port Sharing Project for more information.

The Linux driver comes in a couple of different versions. The 0.26 version of the ppa.c program ships standard with the 2.0.x kernels. Check out

David Campbell's page for the more current version of this program. At the time of this writing the current version is 1.41.

The parallel port ZIP drive is compatible with several types of parallel ports, but currently the 0.26 version of the Linux driver supports only the Standard and bi-directional ports. The newer versions support EPP. If your parallel port has configuration switches (in hardware or on a CMOS setup screen) be sure to set the port into one of those two modes for the 0.26 program.

Be sure that all cables are firmly attached.

Also see section Getting more information

3.2 SCSI version

The external SCSI version of the ZIP drive has two DB25F connectors, and two configuration switches. One switch selects the drive's target address. The choice is limited to target 5 or 6. The other enables an internal terminator, in case the drive is the last one on a chain. The 25 pin SCSI connectors use the familiar Macintosh style wiring. The drive is shipped with a Macintosh type cable, but standard cables and converters are easily obtained if you are using a host adapter with a Centronics or high-density connector.

I have not seen an internal SCSI drive, but I would expect it to have a standard 50 pin DIP header SCSI connector and the same two switches.

Make sure that the target address you choose does not conflict with any other SCSI devices you may have on the same bus. Also be sure that the physically last drive in a chain has termination enabled, or an external terminator installed.

If you have an internal SCSI disk or CD-rom, and you connect your ZIP drive to the existing adapter, you should check to see if there are any terminators on the card that must be removed. Only the two extreme ends of the SCSI bus should be terminated. If your bus is partly internal and partly external, there should be one terminator on the last external device and one on the last internal device, but no terminators on the adapter card itself.

Be sure that all cables are firmly attached.

The ZIP ZOOM host adapter

Iomega markets a SCSI host adapter under the name ZIP Zoom. This is actually based on the design of the Adaptec AHA1520 family of adapters. It has an external Macintosh type DB25F connector, compatible with the cable that comes with the ZIP drive.

Linux supports this adapter with the aha152x driver.

3.3 The ZIP Plus

This is a newer version of the external Zip drive. The drive can sense if it is plugged into a Parallel or SCSI port. This drive will not work with the ppa.c program. It needs a different driver. There is a driver in the alpha stages of development. Check out David Campbells page for more information.

3.4 ATAPI version

There was an IDE version of the drive produced for a while. I think that for the most part this has been replaced by the ATAPI version.

Donald Stidwell sent in these comments on the ATAPI version. Thanks Don.

I use an ATAPI Zip drive and it works with both 2.0.32 and 2.0.33 kernels. I've used it under both RH 5.0 and OpenLinux 1.2 (my current used distribution). To get it to work under OpenLinux, I just enabled ATAPI floppy support in the kernel. OpenLinux does not have this support compiled in by default.

No other drivers are needed. It will mount as an extended partition on partition 4. I.E, mine mounts on HDB4. I mount it under /mnt/zip as noauto, although I don't suppose there would be any real problem with automounting. I just wonder about ejecting disks. I always dismount the drive before ejecting a cartridge.

There are more detailed instructions for the ATAPI install in the Linux Gazette May 1998 issue. See the 2 cent tip section. http://www.linuxgazette.com/

3.5 IDE version

I have not used the IDE version. Eric Backus sent in these comments. Thanks Eric.

I have one of these. It came with my Gateway 2000 computer a year ago. I think most of these were shipped by large OEM companies like this, before the ATAPI version of the ZIP drive was available.

The good news about this drive: no kernel modules or modifications are needed to support it. It looks to the kernel like an IDE hard drive. It worked for me with no effort with kernel 2.0.31 and 2.0.32.

The bad news about this drive: because it doesn't use ATAPI, you can't use the SCSI-to-ATAPI translation, which means you can't use mtools to write-protect disks (or to eject them, for that matter).


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