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Re: E/D and Iomega Zip drive
>>>>> "Ziv" == ZivArazi <ZivArazi@aol.com> writes:
Ziv> Did anyone succeed in using Zip diskettes (Mac format) with
Ziv> E/D ? I tried to "see" the zip as a Mac HD, but even when I
Ziv> 'lock' the disk, it shows it as a DOS drive.
Ziv> Thanks, Ziv
Ziv> p.s. I'm using 1.99o5 and tried all the -dosdrives and
Ziv> -macdrives switches.
There are a number of possibilities for the source of the problem.
Perhaps people on this list can help me out. Those drives are
sufficiently inexpensive that if we weren't really tight on cash right
now, we'd just buy one and figure it out from here, but we just can't
do that right now.
There are two different ways that a Mac disk can have an HFS
filesystem on it. The original way, which was used on the first SCSI
hard drives, and is still used by floppies and HFS CD-ROMs is to just
plop the filesystem down at the beginning of the disk. However, as
disks got larger, it made sense to partition them, so some disks have
partition tables at the beginning. In addition to these two issues is
the question of just how large the underlying block size is on the
disk.
The trouble is that currently, Executor does not support disks that
have partition tables that have block sizes > 512 bytes/sector.
Writing the support for such drives is really fairly easy, the problem
is we have no such critters in house. It may be that the Zip drives
fall into this category. Is there anyone out there who can dump the
first 2048 characters of the drive into a file and then drop the file
into ftp://ftp.ardi.com/incoming? Furthermore, does anyone know with
certainty the block size of Zip drives?
If I get a dump of the first 2k characters and also find out that the
block size is indeed > 512, then I'll modify Executor to theoretically
support larger block sizes and then have someone test it on a Zip
drive. If I can't get answers to those questions I can write some
special code that can be run on the Zip drive that will answer the
questions for me. The latter takes more of my time, so I'd like to
wait a few days to see if anyone has answers to the former.
We very much want to support both the Zip drives and SyQuest's new 130
MB drive. We almost bought one of the SyQuests last night, but the
cost of an unexpected root canal held us back. Once 2.0 is shipping
we shouldn't be quite so broke.
--Cliff
ctm@ardi.com
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