I have wasted countless hours trying to figure out what’s wrong with my Zip drive. I recently reformatted & reloaded my operating system (Win 98) after some technical assistance from MSN went awry, but still have trouble opening quite a few zip files. (I had trouble before the OS was reloaded, too.) Once inside my Zip disk window, I click on an icon and the screen freezes up. No response whatsoever. I finally have to press <alt> <control> <delete> which MAY unfreeze things, but usually pulls up some screen that shows coded OS (?) programs that are not responding. One message I sometimes get is: “Msgsrv 32 not responding.” Or, “this program is not responding. It may be busy, waiting for a response from you, or it may have stopped running.” I wait and wait and nothing happens.
I have about 70 megs of data on 100-meg disks–all from the same PC. I ran defrag on the disk and things seemed to work well until I clicked on some slightly older files and WHAM! I then have to reboot, run Scan Disk, and try again. Ditto.
The techie at ioMega was totally guessing and said I can try two solutions: upgrade my PC to a Win 2000 platform or buy another zip drive and see if it’s the unit itself. The drive is 2 1/2 years old and has seen moderate use. Seems like upgrading to Win2000 is pretty radical and I’m guessing millions of people use Zip disks with Win 98.
Very little is on my PC right now–I have MS Office Premium loaded, the drivers for the modem (Zoom v. 90), and also the drivers for the zip drive. No games, no virus problems either. BTW, this same thing used to happen when I had the Zip drive attached to my iMac. But I know longer use the iMac and the Zip disks have never been in an iMac.
Hmm. If it’s an older Zip drive, you may want to get a new one. A while back, there were a load of Zips that suffered from what people called the “Clicking syndrome”. They would work fine for a while, then start to make clicking noises (usually). After that, they would either no longer work, or destroy the zip disk THEN no longer work. It might be adviseable to get a new unit and not put any disks in the old one.
No clicking pretty much rules it out, but the “Click of Death” from a zip drive actually damages the disks. Those disks can then damage other zip drives. It happens when the r/w heads come loose and catch on the magnetic media, tearing it. So a friend’s disk could not work because the drive is damaging it too (the drive is still the issue, though.) tell you friend to be careful using that disk, because if it DID tear the disk, it could end up ripping HIS r/w heads loose by catching when the disk spins.
Note that this problem was fixed a couple years ago.
Well, you could try to reload new drivers from Iomega. That would be the first thing to do. Also, take out any Iomega programs in your Start Up folder & see if that works better.
… it’s working like a charm. Problem is, it won’t be in a few minutes when it will freeze up again.
I downloaded the newest drivers yesterday. The unit is less than 2 yrs old.
What would explain a zip drive working perfectly one minute, and then freezing up later? And, yes, I’ve run ScanDisk, defrag, and McAfee’s latest anti-virus (updated this a.m.), but the problem is not permanently corrected.
Mine would do the “this program is not responding,” or “device not ready/retry/cancel” bit, but stopped when I laid the drive flat on the desk. It started doing it just a couple days after I bought it. I had to ctrl/alt/del out of it too, because once you attempt it one time, it automatically retries no matter which button you press. I got the latest drivers, and it didn’t matter which USB port I used it on. - The external ZIP 250 drives come with a rubber thingie that holds them vertical in case you don’t have the desk space to lay it flat (which I thought was kinda convenient, until it started not working). I could always tell beforehand if it was screwing up, because when I’d insert a disk it would make two “springing” noises, and then give the message. After I laid mine flat, it stopped giving error messages (crossing fingers).
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I have been told that the internal drives have fewer problems, in case you’re shopping. -But I didn’t have any more space internally, so I got the USB.
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By the by, I heard on a television newscast that ZIP was giving rebates of up to $40 as part of a settlement over price fixing, but never found anything on it at the Iomega site. The purchase date of mine falls inside the dates the newslady said, too. Anybody know anything about this? - MC
Gosh, I’ve had my CDwriter for three years now and I’ve also had email and flat rate access for longer than that… I still don’t see why ZIP drives are being sold today. As I remember it the media cannot hold too much and are very expensive. For backup purposes I create a mirror image of my disk on another hard disk. To send files I use the Net or very, very rarely, CDroms.
Assuming your zip drive is not a USB device (mine is a SCSI external), check to see if the zip drive installation program put anything in your config.sys or autoexec.bat. If there is, REM those out, unplug the device and reboot. Plug it back in and reboot again to see if Win98 recognize the drive. If it does, try copying your files; if it doesn’t, try copying files in a DOS box to see if it works. If it works, it’s your windows driver; if not, it’s your drive. I think your problem is with the Windows driver, and hopefully not the drive itself.
I also remember there’s an article concerning this in MS Knowledge base, but I can’t recall it right now. I’ll look, and see if I can find it.
I have a CD-RW, so I never use Zip disks for backup, but I use them frequently for portable removable storage. Every single lab at my college had a Zip drive on every computer, so I could always use it to transfer large amounts of files from my PC to the lab computers. Since they didn’t have CD-RW drives, and I hate the unreliability of floppies, Zip disks are perfect. It’s a lot smaller than carrying around a removable hard drive, too.
I had a Zip250 with the AC adapter and it worked fine. When I upgraded to the new USB powered unit I began experiencing the same type of freeze ups. I found the problem to be McAfee’s VShield utility (the one that runs in the background all the time). If you set it’s scanning to exclude the zipdrive (exclude the zipdrive’s drive letter and subdirectories) it should stop the freeze ups.
Just be careful about using zipdisks that contain files from a different computer (in terms of viruses). Don’t execute an unknown file directly on the zipdrive. Copy it to the hard drive and virus scan it there first.
Also, Iomega is right about Win2000. It has no problems with them. It even hot swaps them without problems.
As far as Zipdrives vs. CDRs:
CDRs are great, but they are also a pain in the ass compared to zipdrives. CDRs usually have to be ‘enabled’ with DirectCD before copying data and then ‘un-enabled’ to allow any CDROM drive to read them. They are also much slower and less reliable compared to zipdrives. Also, external zipdrives are lightweight and very easy to use as well while external CDR drives are not.
Zipdrives are essentially the 3½ floppy’s replacement (finally!) You can open, close, copy & delete files at will just like the 3½ floppies. CDRs are much more cumbersome in this respect.
When I bought my ZIP 250, CD-RW drives were still ~$300, vs. ~$175 for a ZIP. The other reason was that all the computers at my college have ZIP drives (but not CD-RW’s), and many CIS there courses involve projects that will not fit on one 3.5 floppy. I had the choice of carrying eight or ten floppies or one ZIP100 disk.
Nowadays the prices of CD-RW’s has dropped a lot while ZIP drives has only dropped a little, so it’s not the same question it was before. - MC
Check your Device Manager and make sure you don’t have two sets of Zip disk drivers installed. If you do, remove both of them and re-boot and let Windows re-detect it.
Some random thoughts: I have seen machines slow down incredibly fast and then freeze when another computer they had accessed on the network was shut down.
I have seen what NutWrench says but you have to boot in safe mode and then “ghost” drivers appear which do not appear in normal mode. You should delete them all and reinstall once.
Depending on how your ZIP is interfaced (ie parallel port, SCSI, USB, IDE)-
If it is a parallel port port access unit (which are the slowest and flakiest ones BTW) you may want to make sure the PC BIOS settings have parallel port ECP and EPP enabled and the latest ZIP drivers. If ECP is already enabled and errors are still occuring you may want to try disabling ECP (keeping EPP if possible) as this uses a DMA channel and if the system OS other other hardware is already using this DMA it could possibly hang the system.
FWIW I suspect the real problem is simply that your ZIP drive many be having head R/W difficulties which are not uncommon on older ZIP drive units. If you want to use a ZIP drive you can get an internal IDE ZIP or for around $50 each which are 10x faster and more reliable overall.
Y’ know, now that I revisit this thread, I just adore this response from tech help: “It’s not our fault, or maybe it is: buy another of the same product from us and see if that one works”
Hey, thanks!
The easiest way to verify if the ZIP drive is working is to try installing it on somebody else’s computer (preferrably somebody running Win98, because assuming the hardware is functioning properly it will work in Win98, -mine does) and see what happens there. If you have nobody around convenient, call a computer repair shop and see if they will test it on one of theirs. Even if they nick you for a small fee, it’s worth it to know that the hardware is 100% good.
I have a non-powered USB drive and Win98. Mine never froze like your does, but it did give the two mesages I noted a lot. The driver install instructions say to, and I had to, delete the old driver before installing the new. I found that I couldn’t even keep the Iomega logo desktop shortcut, and so I have to use a regular Windows generic one.
Also try disconnecting the drive, deleting the ZIP driver, updating Win98 completely, re-install the drivers, and then re-connect the drive, in that order.
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Added note: my college’s computer net uses VShield scanning everything every which way, and it takes a looooong time to put a file on a ZIP disk. Like, on a PIII 700Mhz/256M_RAM system, ten minutes for a 15 meg file is normal. - MC
They say their Zip drives don’t interface real well with certain chip sets (in motherboards). I did a quick seach on Googol and found legions of people who are complaining about their Zip drives–and not just of the “click of death” syndrome.
Yes, as mentioned above, the best way to test is to try my drive on another PC–both with my Zip drive and a friend’s, to isolate the problem.
Can’t believe how much money I’ve wasted in downtime. My next step is to buy a new PC–with a long service agreement and on-site repairs.