IBM PS/ValuePoint with IDE Zip

[jhorvath911]

Looking to see if anyone has any experience with this one. I have an IBM PS/ValuePoint 433DX that I am trying to put an IDE zip 100 drive in. The system only has a single IDE connector on it, so I have my IDE>SD adapter as the primary device which is working fine on the system. I originally tried the zip100 Atapi drive and it is not detected at all by the bios (tried it as master single and slave). I tried updating the bios to the latest version and that has not changed anything. I finally decided to find an older zip100ide part number instead of the zip100atapi and that is detected by the bios as a hard drive of 0mb and comes up with an hard disk error on boot up. It doesn't seem to matter if there is a disk in the drive or not on power up, same error either way. Anyone with any ideas?

 

[Caluser2000]

Put in a cheap sound card with tertiary and quandary IDE channels and connect the Zip drive to that. Any ESS sound card with IDE headers will do the job fine.

 

[mR_Slug]

Can you test the drives on another system?

 

[Timo W.]

There's no need for the BIOS to detect the Zip100, as it is not a hard disk. Note that pretty much all pre-Pentium BIOSes are only for detecting hard disks. CD-ROMs and other removable media were detected much later, i.e. in the late 90s. But it's not important, since you need to install a driver anyway. You can't boot from it unless you have a much newer system with built-in support for Zip drives in the BIOS (or a Mac).

Try what happens when you run the driver in DOS. It should find the Zip drive and assign a drive letter to it.

If the driver does not work, check that Master/Slave is jumpered correctly. Many SD card adapters however do not work with more than one device on a cable. In that case, do what Caluser2000 suggested.

 

[jhorvath911]

There's no need for the BIOS to detect the Zip100, as it is not a hard disk. Note that pretty much all pre-Pentium BIOSes are only for detecting hard disks. CD-ROMs and other removable media were detected much later, i.e. in the late 90s. But it's not important, since you need to install a driver anyway. You can't boot from it unless you have a much newer system with built-in support for Zip drives in the BIOS (or a Mac).

Try what happens when you run the driver in DOS. It should find the Zip drive and assign a drive letter to it.

If the driver does not work, check that Master/Slave is jumpered correctly. Many SD card adapters however do not work with more than one device on a cable. In that case, do what Caluser2000 suggested.

Thank you a change in software did the trick. I normally use the palmzip driver for my external parallel drives and was thinking it would work with the internal drive. Switched to the actual Iomega software and it detects the drive just fine for dos. As for the older model zip-100ide I have that *does* detect as a hard drive and give an error I will have to find it a home in another system that doesn't have the same issue.

 

[Timo W.]

Great that it works now.

As for the older model zip-100ide I have that *does* detect as a hard drive and give an error I will have to find it a home in another system that doesn't have the same issue.

I would assume that was an unwanted side-effect and probably why a newer revision was made.