That’s when I remembered that Zip 250 drives cannot long format Zip 100 cartridges due to their different head widths. This time, it said it was write protected but I didn’t believe that. Putting the same disk into the ATAPI Zip 250 drive seemed to go a little further as the size of the disk was correctly detected but I couldn’t format it either: This seems to imply something may have gone wrong with the low-level format of the disk which may not be recoverable. Using sg_format in Linux, I encountered this error with the ATAPI Zip 100 drive: Admitting defeat, I decided to see what would happen if I tried to format the cartridge. I started with the Zip Tools cartridge and tried to get a read on any of the drives. Rather surprisingly, I had problems with them no matter which drive of mine I used, even though my own cartridges written on the ATAPI drive read just fine on all of the drives. The first thing I had to fix was a flat CMOS battery, then a loose SATA cable, then a ZIP 100 drive with dirty heads, then a broken Windows 2000 install. To do this required me to go to my recovery box which hadn’t been used since the move. I turned my attention to the supplied Zip 100 cartridges just to see if they were readable. But seeing as I didn’t want to sacrifice a disk … I decided to leave it for now and reassembled the drive to no change in performance. That way the drive should load the heads onto the paper, seek back and forth a little and give up. I decided that the only way to clean it might well be to sacrifice a ZIP-100 cartridge by removing the media and replacing it with a fixed sheet of paper that covers the area where the heads insert into the cartridge. The rear PCMCIA cable connector and USB socket also seems to be hand soldered. That being said, the underside of the drive does have an amazing array of test points and a few alignment holes. As a result, I had to abort my disassembly at this point. The top shield cover is spot-welded along the edges to the base, making it difficult to remove without damaging it and almost impossible to reinstall. It seems the drive has been designed without serviceability in mind – mainly for cost reduction. Unfortunately for me, even with the drive assembly freed, I had no access to the drive heads. After removing these, it’s still a struggle to slide it out of the casing – the side grips sustained slight damage as a result. The unit is very tightly put together – the drive and controller PCB are secured to the rear case simply by a piece of plastic and two screws. As it turns out, there are no screws holding the exterior casing together – a thin piece of wire in the strategically located holes pushes the latches apart allowing the casing to come apart. To actually clean the heads, undo the springs that provide the auto-parking force for the heads, fold a scrap of clean paper, saturate it in high purity ethanol, manually load the heads onto the paper and gently move the paper from side to side before retracting the heads. This can be done with a head cleaning cartridge, but as they are exceedingly rare, my go-to method is just to disassemble the drive. When I encounter a Zip drive that isn’t particularly co-operative, the first thing I think of is to clean the heads. In this post, I take the time to see if I can make things better, do some experiments on the Zip ecosystem and report on the results. In the last post, I documented the haul of gear donated by a generous reader.
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