Recently I upgrade my computer to a Dell Pentium 4 and I got the option for a zip disk.
I’m not sure if this is an error or all zip-disks are like this, but for some reason it takes a while for the disk to exit from the drive. I’ll push the button and nothing will happen for a 30 seconds, so I’ll push it again. After a while of this type interaction, the disk pops out.
This doesn’t happen all the time though, only after I’ve recently put stuff on the disk. If I leave the disk in for a while (without using it), it comes right out after a push of the button.
In summary, I think I might just be impatient, but has anyone else heard of this? Is this normal for zip disks?
I have windows XP.
Recently I got an error message (and a big blue screen) and the fault (or so says microsoft) was an error in my NVIDIA Graphics Driver.
I have two Zip drives - one on board the PC and one standalone. On both of them under Win2000 the same happens. It’s MS’s rubbishy disk/network handling routine or something. I use the button to eject to avoid this.
Zip disks are dead, and I would say that Zip drives were just junk from the start. My lightly used unit has pretty much stopped working at all, won’t read any disks. I tend to believe that it’s because Zip drives use a sliding head rather than a pivoting head like —most all other disk drives do, but that’s just my guess. I bought it because at the time all my school’s computers had Zip drives, and carrying one zip disk was easier than carrying a dozen floppies. And it worked for a while, but now it won’t work unless I hold it upside down, or sideways, or whatever, and sometime that won’t work: when a disk is inserted, it normally makes one springing sound and spins up. If it makes two springing noises, it’s not reading and won’t accept disks, won’t do anything at all. We got off of using them over time thought because on mine, other students, and on the school computers we all noticed that Zip disks tended to “spontaneously corrupt”, on different harware, Zip-drive types and operating systems–if this happens all it lets you do is reformat the disk and try again. The schools’ internal drives seemed to be the worst for this. Mine was made quite a while after the “click of death” episode. The last time I tried to use mine (a few weeks ago), it was to read the 5 disks I own, that I had saved some old programs on, and it refused to read any of the disks, in any position. … The most ironic part is that I bought it probably 4+ years ago now, and Iomega still regularly sends me spam, but not for Zip-related crap anymore. I wonder why?
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There’s a Zip feature (at least here on my Mac; I’m sure it’s on the PC version as well) that automatically catalogs the disk after you hit ‘eject’. This’ll give you a delay as it updates the disk’s catalog. There should be a ZipTools application somewhere on your hard drive. See if this function is indeed turned on.
Of course, now that I think about it, when I used to have that function turned on, it made it pretty clear that that’s what it was doing; there was a progress bar on the screen and it said ‘updating the catalog’ or some such. So if you’re not getting that, it’s probably not that after all. Still, worth looking into.
The PC caches the data going to the zip drive. You may notice your PC running slower during that 30 seconds while you are waiting, if you try and do something else other than sit there waiting for the disk to pop out. The computer is still writing data to the drive. It happens with one of my zip disks at work also.
If you have recently been writing to the disk you have to realize that the data is cached, just because the operating system tells you it’s finished copying doesn’t mean that the actual physical process of writing to disk is finished. This is why the disks have a “dismount” process, to stop users whipping them out of the drive before they’re ready. It also lets the disk appear to be faster than it actually is, it’s caching stuff on your hard drive expecting to have the time to complete the copy in the background.
So when you press the eject button the zip drive is aware you want to eject, but it won’t release the disk until your data is finished being written.