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Different ZIP Trouble

Raven

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After the long three day battle of the ZIP drive, I have re-encountered the very first problem in the chain.

A parallel ZIP drive works fine on this system. It has a single IDE controller port on the motherboard, so I put my XT-IDE in. Since the XT-IDE doesn't support ATAPI or CD-ROM drives yet, I plugged the ZIP drive and DVD drive into the motherboard, and my HDD into the XT-IDE. It boots, and upon running guest it does not detect the ZIP drive. Now, I haven't set up an internal ZIP drive in 10 years, so I am very fuzzy on if guest even SHOULD work, but I think so.

Just to make sure, I tried the parallel ZIP again and it still works fine, without even a reboot after trying the internal.

Does anyone have experience with internal ZIP drives - is guest.exe fine for them?

I am thinking that perhaps XT-IDE is disabling my onboard controller somehow, but earlier in my crusade I tried having just the ATAPI ZIP and HDD on the motherboard controller, no XT-IDE, so that shouldn't be the case.

Ideas?
 
I've read that page up down left and sideways, all of my internal ZIP drives are ATAPI.
 
I think that the first ATAPI spec happened after the last Valuepoint was manufactured. Unless you can find a BIOS update, an ATAPI Zip drive will not work. There were some early model IDE only Zip drives that did not use ATAPI but I don't know where you can find one these days.
 
Well that answers some questions, lol. Thank you SO much man, seriously. I've been racking my brain for days.

One of my internal ZIP drives isn't explicitly marked ATAPI, so I am going to try it (I figure it's easier to try it than try to find NEC ZIP drive serial number info :p)..

Actually, the info is surprisingly easy to find... http://support.necam.com/oem/zip/fz110a.asp It's atapi.. :(

You'd think that owning two IOMEGA, two NEC, and a Panasonic internal ZIP drive, one of them would be IDE, damn.. :p

I'm afraid to flash BIOSes, every time I do bad things happen and I kill motherboards. I killed my last main box's motherboard, and this tiny box (ordered a flasher to fix that one tho) by flashing their BIOSes... :/

This page (and my other experiences) disagree with you:

http://burks.bton.ac.uk/burks/pcinfo/hardware/atafaq/atafq4.htm
4.6 Will an ATAPI (EIDE) CD-ROM work with an IDE interface?

Yes. These devices were designed to be compatible with ATA (IDE) from the very start, and should work fine.

4.7 Do I need a BIOS update to connect an ATAPI CD-ROM?

No. These CD-ROMs ship with a driver that provides complete support. The BIOS doesn't need to support them and usually doesn't even know they're there. Some modern BIOSes are ATAPI aware and have a special setting; barring those, you can generally leave the corresponding harddisk entry at 'Not Installed'.

Now granted it might be very different between an ATAPI ZIP and an ATAPI CDROM, but I wouldn't think so.. thoughts?
 
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No Adapter Found

I tried it.

I am able to find old-fashioned IDE ZIP drives on eBay but I'm flat broke at the moment.

Edit: Perhaps an ISA IDE controller? *tries*

Edit 2: The XT-IDE doesn't support ATAPI devices, but according to the text I quoted above that might not stop the ZIP drive from working on it.. hrm...
 
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Well, I don't think a mashup of the XTIDE and your motherboard port is going to cut it.

Here's something that might verify it. Pull the XTIDE and connect your ZIP drive up as the master (jumper accordingly). Boot DOS from a floppy with ASPIATAP.SYS in the CONFIG.SYS file.

If the Zip drive is still not seen, then it really is a motherboard IDE issue.
 
I do believe I've done that, but I may have had some other variables in the mix. I'll try it again.

I have a boatload of ISA and VLB IDE controllers, by the way, but I'm an idiot with them and can't get them to do anything on this system which already has IDE.

EDIT: IT... SAID... INSTALLED SUCCESSFULLY O.O

Um.. I put guest.exe on the floppy and then ran that, it assigned it to C and works flawlessly.

Chuck(G), you're a bloody genius... but why did this work, and how can I fix my normal setup to work too? I have three IDE devices - DVD drive, ZIP drive, and HDD. I have one onboard IDE header. I have an XT-IDE and dozens of ISA (and VESA, tho i am using a VESA vidcard and have only one slot) IDE controllers.

Please instruct me? Clearly I did something wrong the first go 'round. :p
 
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That FAQ disagrees with my experience with ATAPI CDROMs. No ATAPI CDROM I have tried would work with the old IDE connectors that predated ATAPI. I know some models around the time of the introduction of ATAPI did work like that but support seems to have been dropped by drives manufactured after 1997. Wish it did, I would have preferred reusing one of my surplus ATAPI CDROMs instead of ordering a SCSI drive.

Try the ASPIIDE.SYS with the earliest manufactured Zip drive.
 
Well I've used the newest DVD burners and such in really old (comparatively) systems (386 and 486) and had no trouble, as long as my .SYS driver supports the hardware then MSCDEX or SHSUCDX will work and find it, even if the BIOS doesn't (though of course the 386 systems were either newer miniaturized ones or had no on-board ISA and I had cards).

That or I'm bending the laws of physics again, that happens sometimes (note the way the ZIP drive driver caused the video BIOS to wonk out on my last thread).

Edit: *Anxiously hopes Chuck(G) comes back with some insight*

Edit 2: Hrm, maybe if I load the ASPIATAP.SYS in my normal config and THEN run guest it will work there too.. *tries these things* Means putting the XT-IDE back in though, btw..
 
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Well, okay, here's the poop. ATAPI has nothing to do with the BIOS on your motherboard. It works by directly talking to your IDE controller hardware. "IDE Controller" in many cases is really a misnomer--the things are a dumb as a box of rocks, consisting of mostly of a couple of transceivers and a latch or two. Most of the issues that people see in supporting large IDE drives, for example, are mostly a matter of BIOS software; the IDE interface itself hasn't changed much since its early introduction.

Given that the ATAPI driver needs to talk to the IDE controller directly, it requires that said controller reside on standard I/O addresses and IRQs. That's why most ATAPI drivers don't work with secondary IDE cards, such as the Promise ones.

My guess is that there's a conflict with the XTIDE controller and the one on your motherboard.
 
Well it's working in my XT-IDE/Mobo "mashup" as you put it now. The key to this mystery apparently lay in loading ASPIATAP.SYS first, even though I've forced guest.exe to scan and load every driver on it's own before - those features must not work properly for ATAPI and nobody noticed while it was still developed. :O

Anywho it's working now, thank you SO much for your help man, I was losing mah mind over this. :p

Hopefully if anyone has this problem in the future this thread will be there to help them.

Edit: read the last line - that means ofc, no conflict.... so why does this help? Who knows.
 
No one who's had to cable together a bunch of early SCSI devices would think this situation to be all that unusual.

A friend, Andy Johnson-Laird, referred to it as "SCSI Voodoo". You just kept juggling cables, terminators, devices and drivers until you found something that worked.
 
You can often add ATAPI devices by plugging in an older sound card with an ATAPI interface. That's how I added a high speed CD drive to my PS/ValuePoint. I'd imagine it would work with Zip drives too.
 
I have a huge lack of knowledge about the IDE headers on sound cards. Looking at them, I see that specific brands are labeled, and they are intended for CDROMs. Does it matter what brand I put where anymore? Is that for the oldest 16-bit drives? Is there a FAQ?

modem7: I wish I found that page in my searching, because believe me, I did search.
 
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