Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Non-Tech : Any info about Iomega (IOM)? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jwk who wrote (33595)	10/27/1997 7:01:00 PM
From: FuzzFace	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 58324

<I think I'd like to blame the quote problem on EP too. Only seems to happen when he trys to time his trades. <g> > You know, the last time IOM tanked it was during " The Great Chartreuse Post-it Note Escapade" which I kicked off in a Sunday post right here. Last night I was going to post the results of my latest fiasco, "Booting an ATAPI Zip with Win95 OSR2", but was too tired after a weekend (about 36 hours all told) of working on it. Conclusion: Until Microsoft/BIOS mfrs/Iomega get all the glitches out, and make Zip act either like a hard drive or a floppy, but not a hybrid, I no longer think it is important to have ATAPI Zips in the stores. If I could lose a weekend messing with it, pity Joe-sixpack. Let the OEMs have them. Or serious PC techno-geeks with no life. I want mine back. BTW, I don't see any way for LS-120 or any other floppy replacement candidate to avoid these same issues. The Results: 1) My new mobo's boot setting for Zip/LS-120 really works. The Zip drive is recognized as ATAPI using PIO Mode 0 (that's part of the reason it's so slow - maybe a future Zip could use UDMA Mode 2.) The BIOS boots to it correctly and assigns to it drive letter A (the 1.4 floppy gets drive letter B.) Once the O/S takes over, it had better understand ATAPI and/or Zip, or you get weird errors and a forced reboot. The only O/S which DOES work, that I know of, is Win95 OSR2. OSR1 (the one you buy in stores) will NOT work. WFW 3.11 does NOT work. I don't know about NT 4.0, but I strongly suspect not. 2) Once you have ATAPI Zip support in the BIOS and O/S, you do not need the Zip Tools for ordinary operations, as long as all disks are unprotected. I can format Zip disks using either Tools, DOS FORMAT or Win95OSR2 format. All 3 give exactly the same results. 3) If the Zip is read-protected (via the Tools), it is un-bootable. It acts just like there is nothing in the drive and moves on to the next boot device in the CMOS setting. 4) To get it all to work, you have to keep the Zip drive letter at A. This is a problem because Win95OSR2 wants to give drive letter A to the floppy. So you must permanently disable the Win95OSR2 32-bit floppy controller driver in the Device Manager. The IDE controller driver may have to be disabled too, so he can go back to the BIOS when doing certain I/O operations. I am hoping that the errors I encountered before that disablement were peculiar to the install process. If not, I believe I may be able to re-enable the IDE controller driver once I install Zip Tools on the system. The bottom line is, slower floppy drive performance (I know, big deal), and (if I can't get it to work with the 32-bit IDE driver enabled) slower HD accesses, because the PC has to use the BIOS to do I/O. The Search For Mercy (or at least pity) Doing this requires a lot of luck and about 36 hours of spare time (or the right web link and about 3 hours of time) but the result is about the slowest computer since I've seen since WinNT 3.51 ran on my old work PC, a 486-33. Do not try this at home. Let your OEM do it, he's already a glutton for punishment. My big mistake was trying to figure it out on my own. After flailing all weekend, I failed to get the GUI up, though I could boot to DOS. I decided to call it a lost weekend. In fact, I was 3/4 done writing up my negative results to this thread when I thought I'd double-check the link for the Z-pA shareware (which I didn't need since it merely emulates the BIOS support in my mobo), and wandered around to a related page I saw months ago and forgot about. There I found the missing secret piece to the puzzle. Now I have a full Win95 OSR2 GUI on a Zip (takes only 57MB, but it's stripped to the bone) The link is: blueskyinnovations.com I modified the instructions slightly because I encountered things slightly out of sequence, but otherwise did everything as he did with one exception, and that was the hangup. I didn't know I had to disable the floppy under safe mode and reboot. I was stuck in safe mode in the middle of the final stage of the install, in a catch 22. It informed me it couldn't complete the install while in safe mode, but if I booted in normal mode, the drive letter was reassigned right in the middle of it all, causing him to halt with a "missing KRNL386.EXE" message. Once I learned how to get past that, I was home free. Best of luck to us all tomorrow.