Hi everyone! I'm new to this forum, but not new to forums in general. I hope I can help here and there, though my Linux knowledge isn't as big as I'd like it to be. I do consider myself much more than a newbie, though not an expert by any means.

After Googling around a bit, it seems that Zip drives which use the parallel port require the following modules:

parport
parport_pc
scsi (and/or scsi-disk)
imm (or another one, can't remember the name)

In my system, I have a PCI card which adds two serial and one parallel port to my rig. The parallel port works fine (as my printer is daisy-chained through the Zip drive), but the Zip drive isn't working because there doesn't seem to be an imm module in Fedora anymore. Not to mention the scsi and/or scsi-disk don't appear to be either.

So I'm curious as to what to do next. I've tried insmod imm and get the generic "insmod: ERROR: could not load module imm: No such file or directory" error. Same goes when I try to load scsi or scsi-disk, hence me assuming they're not on my system.

My knowledge of how the system handles modules is rather small, but I'm a quick learner, and all help is greatly appreciated! For the record, it's an Iomega Zip 250. I'm running Fedora 20, uname -a gives the following:

Linux max-fedora 3.14.4-200.fc20.x86_64 #1 SMP Tue May 13 13:51:08 UTC 2014 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

I'm really hoping to get this working as Windows has totally dropped support for parallel Zip drives past XP.

Thanks everyone!

If I remember correctly, the imm module was intended for the zip drive only, when connected to the parallel port. In order to daisy chain the printer through the zip drive and still have use of either zip drive or printer, the ppa module is the one to use.

Okay. Well the printer can be removed. PPA was the one I was trying to remember earlier, I tried insmod ppa and got the same error as above... any thoughts?

Pretty sure Linux borrowed the scsi idea that zip used. Zip got it form someplace, maybe IBM but I foget. Zip used a neat trick to make a parallel port act to a scsi drive to the OS. Most of what you read is for very old kernels.

You shouldn't need to add scsi support as it is in there already.

I did play with this 20 years ago but haven't in a long time. The old doc's may still be on the web someplace. I'll look for them in a bit.

This may be a slightly better doc. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/IomegaZIPDrive

Couda sworn I had an old zip drive in the office - I did find a disk though. Some-one in this house is not going to believe I threw out some old computer bits ... :shrug:

Anyway, it looks like you might be able to get away just parport, which F20 certainy has. Let us know how you go.

In the Ubuntu page, they say to add the sg module as well. What does this module do? And what does ppa do?

In Fedora 20, is the /etc/modules file in the same place? Doesn't the fact that the insmod command return a file not found error mean there's modules missing? Or am I just doing some wrong (the most likely scenario, lol)?

Thanks for all the tips!

Like all the others, that Ubuntu page is very old - the kernel develops amazing swiftly. If you want to know about a module, use modinfo - it knows where to find things. As does insmod - if they can't find it, you (probably) don't have that module. Unless you built it yourself, and then it's your problem.

Did "insmod parport" not do the job ?.

When I do an lsmod, parport and parport_PC are already listed. The zip drive is nowhere to be found.

Oh, and you may have to play with bios settings for par port. As I recall some of the newer computers used a different spec. The older spec needed bi-directional option for sure.

insmod loads a module into the running kernel, but doesn't affect the device it's intended for.

Use modprobe instead of insmod. That probes the hardware the module is intended, as well as loading the module into the running kernel.