Using IOMEGA Zip IDE Insider under Windows NT (159456)

SUMMARY

The Zip IDE Insider drive is a IDE-based removable media drive. This article will discuss information about settings and troubleshooting of this device.

Currently, the Zip IDE Insider will only work on Windows NT 4.0. Windows NT 3.51 has no removable IDE capability in its Atapi.sys driver because no removable IDE media products were available during its product cycle.

The Windows NT 4.0 ATAPI driver is designed to recognize the new capabilities of removable IDE products such as the IOMEGA Zip IDE Insider or the SyQuest DataFlyer 230 IDE, and so forth.

MORE INFORMATION

Currently, there are no plans to add removable media IDE capability to the Windows NT 3.51 Atapi.sys driver.

Zip Jumper Information

The Zip IDE Insider has a row of jumpers on the back of the unit that are jumpered 1-3 and 5-6 from the factory.

                      1     3   5
|----------------------------------------|-------------|--------------|
|                                        | O----O    O |
|
|             (IDE Connector)            |           | |  (Power Connector)
|
|                                        | O    O    O |
|
|----------------------------------------|-------------|--------------|
                      2    4    6

If you are having problems getting Windows NT 4.0 to use this device you may need to jumper pins 3 and 4 together. This enables media status notification, which is vital to its operation in Windows NT. Otherwise, the unit will effectively emulate a hard disk drive and can even be detected by IDE hard disk drive detection programs typical in the BIOS of a modern computer.

1-3 Jumper is unknown at this time but appears to have no effect. 5-6 reflect Master/Slave. No jumper on 5-6 equals Slave, Jumpered equals Master.

It is not recommended that you allow your computer's BIOS to detect and set Cylinder/Head/Sectors settings for the Zip Insider as it will negate its removable media properties and you will be unable to remount another Zip disk if you eject the Zip disk while the Zip Insider is configured as a hard drive in BIOS regardless of the operating system.

Note: The following information applies only to Windows NT 3.51. This issue was resolved in Windows NT 4.0 Service Pack 2.

In addition, you should not format these disks with NTFS if you desire to use several disks while in a single session of Microsoft Windows NT. This is because NTFS is not a remountable file system and will disable software and hardware ejections of the Zip drive while you are running Windows NT. After you have shutdown, you can change Zip disks freely. If your Zip disks are left formatted as FAT you change Zip disks freely.

The third-party products discussed here are manufactured by vendors independent of Microsoft; we make no warranty, implied or otherwise, regarding these products' performance or reliability.