hmmm. trouble with internal Zip drive on G4/450 tower. Ideas?

[Racer X]

Harbourmaster wrote:
IIRC this my Mac used to work just fine with the Zip drive under 10.3.9 but now does not with 10.4.11

but is it the Zip drivers, or did the OS upgrade dork up the SCSI card drivers?

[Harbourmaster]

Racer X wrote:
[quote=Harbourmaster]
IIRC this my Mac used to work just fine with the Zip drive under 10.3.9 but now does not with 10.4.11

but is it the Zip drivers, or did the OS upgrade dork up the SCSI card drivers?
No SCSI involved.
This is an ATA zip drive installed in an upgraded Sawtooth. The Iomega drivers should also not be an issue as the disks themselves are formatted Mac HFS+ so they work even if there is no Iomega software installed...

FWIW I have a Firewire ZIP250 Drive that I tried on another Mac running under 10.4.11 and no disks would mount (or even show up in Disk Utility) booted into OS 9 it works just fine. I'll have to look and see if I have an HD hanging around with 10.3.9 on it tonight just to see if it works correctly there as I remember...

[clay]

UPDATE -

I went ahead and got OS 9 installed on the machine after several fits and starts. There was a zip disk in the drive through this process (couldn't eject it cause the computer didn't think there was anything there), and it never showed up on the desktop.

ASP showed the drive, but no media inserted.

I installed the updated Iomega drivers, pulled off the faceplate and ejected the disk. Reinserted the disk and it showed up on the desktop. I was able to copy all my data off the old disks, and now we're cookin! I haven't had enough time yet to check and see if I can get it working in 10.4, but I may give that a shot next.

[JoeH]

It should work in 10.4. It may take checking the install to make certain all the needed kext files are there to support using the Zip drive. But as a data point, I picked up a random Zip disk from next to my older OS 8.6 Starmax where I usually use them and tried it in the Zip 100 drive in my G4 running OS 10.4.11. It loaded right up and mounted the disk to the desktop, and I had not used the drive in at least a couple years. The system disk for the G4 was a clean install from the 10.4 DVD and then used Migration Assistant to bring in parts of my setup from a borked prior system disk.

[decay]

ahem, ladies.

http://support.apple.com/kb/TA38434?viewlocale=en_US

[JoeH]

That is an old article, most of its troubleshooting besides that of the drive itself is geared to OS 9 and prior. That is why it was archived 5 years ago. There was an equivalent article for OS X, but the changes they have made to the Knowledge Base has made searching it much harder.

[Harbourmaster]

Well I discovered why the firewire drive didn't mount disks, the cable was not plugged all the way into the back of it. Works just fine now.... DOH!

[decay]

JoeH wrote:
That is an old article, most of its troubleshooting besides that of the drive itself is geared to OS 9 and prior. That is why it was archived 5 years ago. There was an equivalent article for OS X, but the changes they have made to the Knowledge Base has made searching it much harder.

the main part i wanted to highlight was holding the zip's button in while powering on the Mac - OS 9/X irrelevant.

i had to perform that reset more than a few times on G4s back in the day.