Macintosh SE SuperDrive and SCSI Zip 100 Drive

How much do ZIP disks sell for these days? Do they even make and sell them anymore? Probably would have been cheaper to buy a bigger hard drive for your Quadra 700.

Nice SE!

Zip disks are awesome. I have an old external SCSI Zip 100 drive. I have about 25 disks or so.

A friend of mine whose main machine (heck only machine) is his trusty Amiga 4000 trades files with me. Since he has a Zip drive, we can transfer 100MB of stuff at a time. That's much better than floppy or e-mail.

Don't knock Zip drives.

I love 'em to death and will be purchasing a 250MB USB unit soon.

Click-click drives...eww. Many people swear by 'em, but i hate the bastards.

But don't worry about me...i hate click-click drives mostly because mine went click after only 1.5 years of careful use and TLC.

I already have some disks from two dead drives.

Nice conquest!

Zip drives are incredibly useful for transferring large amounts of data between older Macs quickly. I've got the same kind of Iomega Zip drive which I use on my Quadra 700, IIcx etc and it's really handy because my PowerMac G4 has a built-in Zip drive. This makes trnsferring files between the G4 and older machines very easy indeed.

I got both the SE and Zip Drive today! The SE is actually a SuperDrive. Is there any difference between an FDHD and SuperDrive? Also, the hard drive in it doesn't seem to work. Any ideas on how to revive it? I haven't tested the Zip Drive yet.

I have a parallel version of a zip drive, quite nice. Giant wall wort, however. I have about 15 zip disks for the thing too. Still have an unopened 10 pack I got on clearance for $10 (1/disk!!) down from $70.

If I ever get parallel card for my new IIe, I plan on getting the zip drive working with it. I know it's possible. One disk can hold a whole collection of disk images, and I bet I can boot from those images. Then use another one to hold some OSes and/or basic programs.

-digital

i know my local walmarts has zip 100 disk's in there discount isle for like $4 a pop, i think they got lowered down to $2 a pop. originally they was $9 when this walmarts was first opened about a year ago ( and was the price i paid when i got mine). i bought 2 of them ( one for $9 and one for $4 )

you just have to be on the look out for them. i would check walmarts around the electronic isle and the discount isle for them. your walmarts might have them.

My Quadra 700 won't even start up with the Zip Drive plugged in. It freezes RIGHT before extensions load. The mac boots up with it connected and extensions off. (This isn't because of Iomega Drivers, I checked) I can't get the drive to make disks show up at all. I tried with its terminator on and off, and with it's SCSI ID as 5 or 6 (the two on the slider). What's making this not work?

The Hard Disk in the SE SuperDrive seems to be repairable, but how? When I start the mac up, it shows the happy mac and the hard drive light starts blinking just like it's starting up from the hard drive. But then the icon changes to a ? Disk, and the blinking light goes out. When I start up from my System 6 install disk, the Hard Drive is not detected. Because of the happy mac and blinking, I believe this can be fixed. Is there any sort of program that I could add to a boot disk and repair the Hard Drive?

I love the compacts!

Yes, this SE makes me feel complete.

try a patched version of apple hdsc setup

I found Norton Utilities 1 in "a special download space" and it's fixing my hard disk!

All I need to do now is get the Zip drive working. Anybody know how?

The HD was MFS! :O

Only Norton can see the MFS disk, and Norton can't erase disks! How do I erase this MFS disk? HD SC Setup doesn't see it. :?:

In a peripheral drivers area there is a FWB Hard Disk Toolkit that is a pretty competent disk formatter utility you might try. I haven't used that exact archive but have a version that has served very well, and works on 6.0.8 and up. Re the zip drive, and your disk being full, I am speculating that the disk might be so full that there is insufficient room to open whatever size read/write buffers that might be needed by the zip driver when a connected zip is detected. Use version 4.2 (which works for me) or later of the Iomega Driver, which is also available in an uploads area. Power up the zip drive before the computer is powered up.

Can you send me your copy as an email attachment? That version doesn't have a serial number. :-x

If I turn the Zip Drive on first, I get the blinking ?. It's the same with any other SCSI device. I believe this is due to the non-Apple Hard Drive. I will try this Zip Drive on my 4400 and/or LC III.

maybe it is a IDE? because if there is no SCSi ID switch, then it is probably IDE or you are using the same ID as HD ...

I notice under Diagnostics and Utilities, Hard Disk Tools, there is a version of Apple HD SC Setup - All Drives that appears to be the patched version. I tried it on a non-Apple external SCSI drive and it recognizes it. So if you can add this to a boot disk or rig your drive temporarily as an external drive on one of your other Macs, this is a possible formatting solution.

I'll try the HD solutions everyone mentioned tonight.

I tested the Zip Drive on my 4400, and it works fine, no problem… What makes my Quadra 700 act this way? Is it related to the 3rd Party HP HD? How do I get the Zip Drive to work on the Quadra 700? There is an ID switch. It has two choices, 5 or 6. I tried both. Neither make it work. The Zip Drive makes the Quadra 700 freeze during startup with extensions on. It doesn't happen with extensions off. This isn't because of the Zip Driver because I tried with the zip extensions deleted. Maybe some random extension needs to be turned off? I'll try that later.

I used to quite like Zip drives for transfers but I'm all about the networking or serial connections these days.

I actually love serial connections a lot cos they're so simple and versatile..

How about checking SCSI IDs and termination?

Just a thought.

It's great that the zip works on your 4400. quinterro beat me to the punch. You can use Apple System Profiler, SCSI Probe or similar to reveal the SCSI addresses that the system detects with the slider switch in SCSIID positions 5 and 6, and make sure they really are 5 and 6 respectively. Then SCSI Probe your Quadra 700 system to get the complete SCSI address space assignments without the zip installed to make sure there are no conflicts. You can also see if the Quadra 700 SCSI bus has too many or too few terminators hanging off the starting and ending bus ends. The usual rule is one internally at/near the internal end (usually the internal HD) and one at the far external cable end if there is an external cable. Enabling the internal zip drive terminator if it is last on the cable is fine, no need to plug an old fashion terminator pod on the output connector. It is safest if the zip cable is an official Iomega labelled one hooked per the instruction diagram on the bottom of the drive, not a RS-232 straight thru patch substitute. If you have a CD/DVD burner driver/software pkg configured, you could try disabling the extension to see if there is some identity crisis going on at initialization time...

I did SCSI Probe with the Extensions Off. It saw an Iomega Zip 100 drive. The ID was fine.

The patched HD SC Setup erased the HD!

This Macintosh is great. It starts up in only a couple seconds!

I think I just figured out more about the Zip Drive. Here's how:

1. I disabled SCSI Manager 4.3

2. Everything became unstable

3. My SCSI CD-ROM Drive worked without SCSI Manager 4.3

4. The Zip Drive didn't work even though I had good drivers that had worked on my 4400. Maybe it needed SCSI Manager 4.3? Well if so why doesn't my Quadra 700 tolerate a Zip Drive and SCSI Manager 4.3, and not lock-up before extensions are loaded?

I really don't get this. This particular Macintosh is rather odd (not running Systems later than 7.5.1 without everything going haywire.) I still wonder if the 3rd party HP SCSI HD that came inside of it is involved with this

Help me!! :-*