Corrupt 100MB ZIP disk?

Wanted to do a few prints for a client & spent over 6 hours trying to

get the images from the zip disks where they were kept. Out of 32 zip

disks, 100mb size, 26 would not even read in the zip drive. That's

right, put them in and the message keeps coming up "no disk in the

drive" or something similar.

Finally went downstairs & mixed up the color chemistry & printed the

21 prints that needed to be done.

How do I get these things to open?

Is your drive a 100 meg zip drive? These drives became notorious for failing about 1 or so after they were first introduced. It was "click death". You can recognize it by noticing a constant click coming from the drive while it's trying to detect the disk. The cause of the problem was due to the drive being close to an improperly shielded magnetic source (if I remember correctly. I had two drives fail at work. It was about 1 in 10 chance that it would read the disk.

 

Try moving the drive as far away from your computer speakers and computer as you can. The one I have home is on my desk away from my speakers and my computer is on the floor. Hence, I've never had the 'click death' with my home zip drive.

We run 3 zip disk drives here. 2 are USB; one is old parallel port. Usual "failure modes for us" are:<BR><BR>Wrong drive letter being tried.<BR><BR>Zip power supply not plugged in<BR><BR>USB or parallel cord not plugged in.<BR><BR>USB cable plugged in back of computer USB; which doesnt always work on 2 of our computers; front USB always works. <BR><BR>Trying to open up customers MAC files on our PC; on a computer without a MAC conversion program. <BR><BR>Several of our computers require one to have to close and reopen Windows Explorer before an external USB zip drive is found for than ZIP session. <BR><BR>Several of our ZIP disks have been in drives writing when a power failure occured; these disks many times get goofed up and only show between 10 to 75 megs free space. Reformating the zip disk freed up the lost space. <BR><BR>If you have a click death problem; do not try all the disks; you may ruin them all. You need another zip drive to solve your problem.<BR><BR>Out of 4 Zip drives over 5 years; one of ours has failed; it was NOT a click death; but it just died gracefully. I have about 30 zip disks; none have failed yet.<BR><BR>New USB zip drives here are 50 bucks at SAMS club; what is your data worth?<BR><BR>We have many clients still bring us data to plot and print on ZIP disks.

Stupid question, but are the discs password protected? That will give you that message when you try to access the drive. Right click on the drive in " My Computer", click on "Properties" then the "Disc" tab. There it will tell you if it is read/write protected. <p>

As to the "click" problem, this friggin thing only seems to do it when the disc is near full when you write/read from or to that part of the disc that is used last. Never had a problem with it reading a disc when it was inserted (yet).

Zip drives are notorious for this "problem." It's more of a habit really. 100mb were most famous for the click death, and the disks that died could spread pain and suffering to many machines. I've seen people try damaged disks in several drives, ruining all of them.

 

If its formatted for a PC and you're loading it in a mac, watch out. It either won't work or it'll lock the machine up. I've had both happen. Vice versa for Mac disks to a PC.

 

The 250mb disks not only are a little more reliable, but a little quicker. Thanks to the drive mostly. Even still, if it's critical data, don't use zip disks if they're the only copy in existance.

 

One other possibility for this is the drivers. I've never been particularly impressed by Iomegas software and it often would cease to function as you installed other things. You'd have to reload the Iomega drivers to get it to work again. Fortunately this didn't mess any other installations up. But it's a nuisance. With CDs being so cheap, I haven't picked up a Zip in ages. Except to look at it.

The Jazz drives are the only media in this series I've find reliable.

 

CD-R's and RW's seem far more easy to deal with and dependable than ZIP media.

I've run into this problem on many occasions. I am the computer tech in my medical lab. The two usual things are at fault:

 

1. Driver issue. Do you have the latest drivers? Are they completely compatible with your current setup? (this includes your motherboard, controller, even BIOS chip) Best way to find out is look on the IOMEGA website to see an issues that the drive may have with your computer.

 

2. What connection is your zip drive on? Is it connecting to an IDE port? If so, try to isolate it (don't have another slave on the same port). Certain models conflict with various CD drives, CD-R/RW, DVD players, etc when shared with the zip drive on the same port. If you MUST share the IDE port, try to have the zip drive sharing with the hard disks.

 

My experience differs from Scott's greatly. However, the 1Gig Jazz drives I tested were part of their first generation models. Their reliability may have improved since then. Agreed that the burnt CDs are vastly more reliable.

Anyone who has been around long enough to remember what a SyQuest disc is knows why its a bad idea to store anything important on a zip disc. All of my earliest digital work is trapped on SyQuest discs and one of these days I'm going to have to pay someone to do an extraction.

 

Your best bet is to store your images on an ISO filesystem in a non proprietary format like tiff or jpeg.

 

I'm trying to keep my entire collection on two different computers as well as backed up to CDR. The only thing I should be doing that I'm not is putting the CDRs in a safe deposit box.

 

As the popularity of CDrom starts to fade I'll need to convert all my backups to whatever the replacement media is going to be.

 

I'm also trying to make a lot of prints of my best work. I'm trying to store all my prints in a proper environment so they will last.

 

Image conservation is difficult! Its a lot of work but some day your great grandchildren will be glad you went to all the trouble.