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Reviews
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2158
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02-12-2004
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Description:
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Although the Zip drive has been made almost extinct with the increasing popularity of the CD-R and CD-RW, they are still very useful devices for transferring a medium amount of data where speed of read/write is not paramount. I find they are particularly useful for making backups with. But enough of that, let's get on with the HCL Review.
Basically, these devices (and the atapi zip 100, I suspect) can be used with a number of different methods, although I favour one method in particular.
These devices are recognised as standard IDE/ATAPI storage devices, and as such can be accessed with their IDE/ATAPI device name. If the drive is the secondary slave, then it'll be /dev/hdd. This follows general Linux naming convention and as such can easily be added to your fstab. One caveat, however, is that Iomega - in their infinite wisdom - decided that their discs should use the 4th partition. As such, although the device is /dev/hdd in my example, the filesystem that you will want to mount is likely to be on /dev/hdd4. A typical entry would be something like:
Code:
/dev/hdd4 /mnt/zip auto user,noauto,users 0 0
Of course, as with anything you are mounting, the mountpoint (/mnt/zip) will have to exist before you can do anything!
The above works for many people, and if it works satisfactorily for you, then you can stop reading now. If, however, you have had problems, or if you want to be able to use the software eject functions, then read on!
I started using this method purely because I wanted to have the ability to eject the disc with software rather than bending down and pressing the eject button... because I'm lazy. Basically, you can make your Linux system believe that your Zip drive is actually a SCSI drive, rather than an ATAPI one. This is very easy. First you need to discover which device it is. As with the above example, I'm going to use /dev/hdd for this example.
So, you know what ATAPI device name your Zip has. What you do next is edit your bootloader's configuration file so that whenever you boot the device is automagically treated like a SCSI device. If you're using Lilo to boot, then you need to edit /etc/lilo.conf. If you're using GRUB, then you need to edit /etc/grub.conf.
Open up the file in your favourite editor. Go to the bootloader's entry for your Linux system and edit the append section. What you want to add is hdd=ide-scsi. Save the file. If you're using Lilo, then you need to run /sbin/lilo in order to put the changes into effect so when you next boot your new option is added. If you're running GRUB, you should be done now.
With this method, when you reboot your Zip drive will now appear as a SCSI drive. If you have no other SCSI storage devices connected, then it will probably be displayed as /dev/sda. As with above, the filesystem is likely to reside on the 4th partition (as this is to do with the discs, not the drive) so your fstab entry should look something like:
Code:
/dev/sda4 /mnt/zip auto user,noauto,users 0 0
.
You should be ready to go with your newly-working Zip drive.
Please note that if you had the drive present when you installed your Linux OS, it may well have been configured for you, although it could have been configured incorrectly. From personal experience, sometimes the drive will be configured to use the ide-floppy module rather than the ide-scsi module. Although some people have had success with this setup, I have found it to be more reliable using the ide-scsi method.
Please also note that this specifically does not relate to the parallel-port Zip drives. For those, please refer to the HCL review in the External Drives section.
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Keywords:
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iomega atapi zip 250
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Connection Type:
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IDE/EIDE/ATAPI
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