Zip Drives: Mondo Bizzarro

Factual Questions
1
      • Just got a Zip 250 a few days back. Mine is the USB with the (oh, hell, the slot for an adaptor for a laptop). I’ve noticed a couple things:
  • It is only about twice as thick as a Zip disk. I can see a little through the slot, but hows this thing work? Why does it sound like a dentist’s drill? Are there any internal diagrams online?
  • I noticed that it sometimes has problems. I checked the Zip site for Win98 problems, and it noted that sometimes transfer rates can be very slow, but offered no fix. I have seen myself that if you try to move files on or off it, sometimes the system font gets screwed up and you have to guess as to all your menu questions, until you can reboot. I also noticed that it can have problems if I try to copy or move multiple nested folders at once. I figured this had something to do with my own Zip drive on a USB situation, but it’s not so: my college’s computers have the same problem and they use internal Zip drives. Previously, if I had found a font or two on the college’s computers I liked, I would copy it onto a floppy with no problems. Today I got ambitious and decided to copy all of the 350 or so fonts off a school computer at once. About a half-minute into it, the system went batty and all the system fonts disappeared! All the buttons went blank, except for only an occasional dash here or there. All the buttons got real short (but normal width) too. I got out, rebooted and checked the Zip again, and the first 99 fonts had been moved to the Zip. I did manage to get them all back on the system, but gave up trying to copy the rest. ~ I haven’t ever had any other program or drive do this, and previously before I had a Zip drive (or any zip disks) I never saw it on the school’s computers either. What gives? Is this fairly normal for these things? - MC
2

It almost appears as though you are attempting to move, not copy, the files in question. Instead of dragging and dropping (if that’s what you’re doing) use the edit tab and select “copy”.

3

I agree, and if Windows suddenly has an urge to look for a font and you have inadvertantly removed it, it might behave a little strangely.

4
      • How does Windows know its own system files, just by their names? At home, [on the old drive] I had downloaded a bunch of fonts off the web. I wanted to transfer them to the new installation on the new drive, because eventually Windows will have the old drive and Linux the new. When I copied the old installation’s FONTS folder to the desktop and went to rename it oldFONTS (so that I wouldn’t get it confused with the new drive’s FONTS folder) I got a warning message about renaming a Windows system folder. When I opened the oldFONTS folder and the new installation FONTS folder, , , -all the web fonts from the oldFONTS folder were already copied into the new FONTS folder. ~!~ As an experiment, I created another folder on the same desktop and named it FONTS, and then renamed it FONTDS, but got no warning message. I yam stumped. - MC
5

Windoz uses several fonts & you cannot mess with them if they are in use. So from DOS you could do things with them but when you run Windoz again its going to be upset.

“How does Windows know its own system files, just by their names?”

Locations too.

You can use RUN:SFC this runs the system file checker on W98 only. Wonderful tool.