Is it the ZIP Disks or the ZIP Drive that needs repairing?

[cyberkooz]

I purchased a Dell Dimension 4550 Pentium 4 system with Windows XP Home
Edition approximately 18 months ago along with ZIP 250 ATAPI Internal drive
installed with the latest version of IomegaWare version 4.0.2. Just
recently I received an error when I placed in a ZIP 100 Disk into the drive.
The light came on the ZIP 250 Drive and stayed on for about 1 minute and 40
seconds. I could hear the ZIP Drive working as it appeared to try and read
the disk. When the light on the Drive went out and I could no longer hear
the Drive working, I clicked on the ZIP icon and received the error message:
"Please insert disk into drive D". The disk is not read/write protected.
At that point I thought it may be a faulty ZIP Disk.



Then only a few days later I placed another ZIP 100 Disk that is also not
read/write protected in the drive to back-up my Quicken data from within my
Quicken XG program. The light on the ZIP Drive came on, and stayed on for
about 1 minute and 40 seconds while at the same time I could hear the ZIP
Drive working. I clicked on "Back-Up" within the Quicken XG program and the
following error box appeared: "Unable to write to Drive D:", followed by
another error message: "File not backed up". I was able to do a long
format with this disk on an older system with Win 98 and a ZIP 100 Drive.
It took a couple of tries to format, but it finally worked. When I
performed scandisk it showed a lot of bad sectors.



Within a few days later I had the same problem with a ZIP U250 Disk which is
read/write protected. I placed the disk in the ZIP Drive and the "Unprotect
Box" appears. After I enter the password, the box disappears and the ZIP
Drive begins to read the disk which takes over 2 minutes. During this time
the system freezes up. The "Unprotected Box" appears, I click OK and the
ZIP Drive runs for over 1 minute. When the ZIP Drive stops running after
this time I click on the ZIP Icon. The ZIP Drive light comes on and stays
on while the disk is being read, which takes over 6 minutes until it stops.
A box pops up stating Disk not formatted: "The Disk In Drive D: Is Not
Formatted. Do You Want to Format Now?" I've clicked "No", than the whole
process begins all over again. If I click yes to format, it appears to
begin formatting. The drive works for a few minutes than a box appears
"Unable to Format".



I went to the Iomega Support Site and printed the article: "Please insert a
disk into drive x" error message when inserting or trying to read an Iomega
disk. It appears there is a problem with the Drive itself rather then a
faulty disk as I had originally thought. Seems too coincidental that three
disks would become faulty within a week. I've tried to format two of the
disks as mentioned in the support article without success.



Is it the ZIP Disks or the ZIP Drive that needs repairing? Where do I go
from here?



kooz

[Tony Cianfaglione]

It sounds as if your drive is faulty and it's trashing your disks. I had
something similar occur when I had a power supply failure and it wasn't
outputting enough juice to keep my read/write heads above the disks and
the result was damaged disks. My other drives were unable to read/write
to teh damaged disk either and Win95/98 formats wouldn't work.

I used Win3.1 guiutils to reformat and verify (via long format) the disks
and was able to salvage every disk. My drive worked fine once the bad
power supply was replaced. The disks it trashed basically needed
reformatting as the directories were also destroyed. I was fortunate that
physical damage didn't occur otherwise the disks might have been finished
permanently.

Your disks that have many bad sectors might be salvagable in the above
manner as mine also had many bad sectors but after formatting with the
above routine, they all passed scandisk surface scans with flying colors.
I don't guarantee you will have the same results but it's always worth a
try before tossing the disks.

-----------------------------------------

Post by cyberkooz
Is it the ZIP Disks or the ZIP Drive that needs repairing? Where do I go
from here?

[D***@ix.netcom.com]

"cyberkooz" <***@cogeco.ca> wrote:

[snip]

Post by cyberkooz
Then only a few days later I placed another ZIP 100 Disk that is also not
read/write protected in the drive to back-up my Quicken data from within my
Quicken XG program. The light on the ZIP Drive came on, and stayed on for
about 1 minute and 40 seconds while at the same time I could hear the ZIP
Drive working. I clicked on "Back-Up" within the Quicken XG program and the
following error box appeared: "Unable to write to Drive D:", followed by
another error message: "File not backed up". I was able to do a long
format with this disk on an older system with Win 98 and a ZIP 100 Drive.
It took a couple of tries to format, but it finally worked. When I
performed scandisk it showed a lot of bad sectors.

It's not a good idea to run a thorough ScanDisk on a Zip disk. Zip
drives handle bad sectors automatically as they are encountered via
the drive's firmware. Non-Iomega software which attempts to deal with
bad sectors can apparently interfere with Iomega's method.

[snip]

Post by cyberkooz
I went to the Iomega Support Site and printed the article: "Please insert a
disk into drive x" error message when inserting or trying to read an Iomega
disk. It appears there is a problem with the Drive itself rather then a
faulty disk as I had originally thought. Seems too coincidental that three
disks would become faulty within a week. I've tried to format two of the
disks as mentioned in the support article without success.

It could be the drive. But if you have been doing surface scans with
ScanDisk (or other non-Iomega software), then I suppose it's possible
that the disks have been "damaged". Do you have disks which still
work properly? If so, then that might point to something other than
the drive.

Since you said the problems just began recently, had you installed any
software or made any hardware changes to your system just before the
problem began? That's something else to consider.

Have you been here? http://www.grc.com/tip/clickdeath.htm
If you have any 250MB disks which still work (testing with 100MB disks
in a 250MB drive isn't worthwhile), you should see what TIP has to
say.