How to mount zip disks?
 

This has been battering my brain since last night and i'm no further forward. I've read dozens of threads on EAB and other sites on the subject and people say they figured it out but no one ever says how they did it.

I am using an almost default ClassicWB OS 3.9 and as far as I can see nothing is mounting the ZIP drive in Devs/DosDrivers (i've got PIPE, VNC and VNR in there), there's no mention of mount in user-startup or startup-sequence (except to bind drivers from Devs/DosDrivers).

The system can see my IDE Zip drive (using IDEfix), it shows up in HDToolBox and I have these icons on the Workbench screen and i've no idea how they are getting there

PC4:Uninitialized
DF4:gibberish (few numbers and none English characters)

If I put a fat or fat32 formatted disk then these appear as well (the disk reads fine in the PC and has Amiga related files on it)

PC5:Uninitialized
DF5:Uninitialized

What I want to do is read PC formatted zip disks as I have a USB Zip drive for my PC and this internal IDE one in my A4000. Amiga formatted disks might be useful at some point but the main purpose of this is to move files from one computer to the other quickly when needed so it's not important. Fat95 is in L and so is CrossDOSFileSystem.

I've tried quite a few scripts from Aminet and none of them work for me. My drive is showing up on scsi.device unit 3 and even making these changes to mount lists i've downloaded is not making any of them work.

Can someone tell me what I am doing wrong and if I need to get some files provide me with links to them please?

You don't need anything more than the standard Zip DOS driver, modified to use Fat95 for long filename support. OS3.9 comes with one that works out of the box. I suspect there are some sort of other DOS drivers or patches that are interfering there. There should be a Zip DOS driver in your Storage drawer, and OS 3.9 comes with some tools for handling Zip drives that might give you some more information on them.

Edit: I think actually that IDEFix comes with some sort of LS120 support included. Perhaps that has been activated my mistake somehow?

Edit 2: Are you sure there are no files in DEVS/DOSDrivers with no icon that you're not seeing but which might be mounting?

you can try those zip tools, IIRC they came with all you need to make a zip drive working.

it's been a long time, but i remember there was a physical write protection - if so, just enable it before you start, until the disks are fully recognized :)

XFS comes with mountlists for ZIP disks too.
http://aminet.net/package/disk/misc/xfs

I use XFS to mount pretty much everything.

Aminet has DOS drivers for PC, Mac and Amiga Zip disks.

I have a 250mb Scsi Zip drive. It reads 100mb & 250mb disks.
The only dosdriver for PC formatted disks that works for me is ZPC in ZipStandard.lha from Aminet.
It will mount both 100mb & 250mb disks. If you swap disks then you need to type> diskchange ZPC:

Why does setting up any hardware on the Amiga have to be such a pain in the arse? I'm only trying to make this work to get some files over to try and get my CV working again.

Any way i've looked at every suggestion made, none of them want to work or i'm not doing something right. Can someone run this down step by step for me? here's what i've done so far, please do not assume I have done something or am aware I need to do something (I most likely will be aware but just to be sure).

1. Installed drive physically on ide splitter (it has a DVD drive and two hard drives on it as well)
2. Installed IDEfix, every device is seen by the system
3. Insert disk in zip drive... icons show up (see first post)

Now i've tried running some scripts on Aminet including ZipStandard.lha, XFS and ZipMount.lha with nothing happening (of course ive been changing to scsi.device and unit 3 in scripts).

I did try using zip4mat.lha on a disk that was already fat formatted but it wasn't showing up in the Amiga. It did make the disk readable but the files on it before I formatted it were not (bare with me here). When I put the disk back into the PC, it read as if the format on the Amiga did not take place and the files showed up again..... I also tried partitioning the disk on the Amiga, the whole disk showed up properly on the Amiga but when I put it back in the PC it's still a fat disk with the files on it from beforehand.

Then I decided to use diskpart to wipe it, put it back in the Amiga and now the script I used to format it for the PC last time does nothing to the disk now even though the script says it has. :banghead

I've not installed any other drivers, I basically took CWB 3.9 and activated it with my 3.9 CD and loaded it on my A4000. P96 refuses to work so i'm attempting to try CybergraphX4... but when I try to install that it refuses and asks for the CD to be inserted.

I have all the hardware I could never of dreamed about having in the mid 90s but getting any of it to work is impossible. (Shit all will work in my 1200 tower with Mediator either but that's another story).

While Zip drives were fairly popular on the Amiga, very few used the IDE version.

When I was using fat formatted zip disks i used to use mountdos from aminet to mount them. I also had an ide drive and idefix. Cant remember all the details now but you need fat95 in L and run mountdos with the device in cli (read the instructions) and it just mounts it. no mountlists or dosdrivers or scripts needed if i remember right.

How did you have the disks formatted?

They were either pre-formatted or I formatted them using Windows 95. So fat32 I expect.
My A1200 still has a zip drive installed in the floppy bay so I could give it a go if that helps.

I've always (well, for the past 15 years) used an IDE Zip drive on my A1200, never had any problems using it with a standard OS 3.9 install. Connection method shouldn't make any difference (parallel drives excepted), all it needs is a modification to the DOS Driver to use the correct device, be it scsi.device, atapi.device, 1230scsi.device or whatever.

I'm happy to post the mountlist here if you like?

Okay, here's my mountlist:

I've set the device and unit parameters in the tooltypes:
The only differences from the standard OS 3.9 one is that I've changed it to use atapi.device and Fat95. The original script worked out of the box. I don't understand what is different with ClassicWB or what the other scripts have been doing to your system (I suspect they were for OS versions before there was official support), but it literally should just work out of the box with OS 3.9, regardless of whether it's a SCSI or IDE drive.

-Acid-, would you be able to create an image file from one of your Zip disks, compress it and upload so I can take a look at it? I don't need the entire image file (which would be 100,663,296 bytes long I think), just the first megabyte should be enough. Then I can see what the exact partition layout is. If the partition layout doesn't exactly match that in the mount file which you're using, that could explain the problem.

You could use a program like WinImage on Windows, or use a Linux boot CD and the dd command to create the image file.

Daedalus, your mount file is for unpartitioned Zip disks (i.e. a single partition fills the entire disk). The default formatting for PC Zip disks has (as far as I can remember) an MBR partition table, so your mount file wouldn't work with Zip disks originally written on a PC.

Interestingly, it has no problems reading a Zip disk that was originally formatted on my PC, and it's a mountlist that was supplied with OS 3.9 for that very purpose. I've been using it to transfer to and from PCs for 16 years and counting, though in recent years it gets very little use. So I'm not sure what the story is there but it works for me. Perhaps it's just that the geometry specified in the mountlist coincides with the standard partition borders so that it still works regardless of MBR.

Fat95 supports scanning for MBRs when lowcyl is 0. The highcyl is not used in this case, but it must be present in the dosdriver.

The readme also says that you should use the dostype 0x46415401 to select the first MBR partition. 0x46415400 should only be used for floppy disks.

Ach!

I had this problem years ago when somone sent me a zip disk through the post.

If I remember correctly I had to use some kind of disk analyser program which told me the info, then had to duplicate it all in a different mountlist eg: ZIP2:

Ah, thanks.

If I recall correctly, PC-formatted Zip disks (either formatted at the factory or with Iomega's formatter) have an "unusual" partition layout (i.e. more than one partition). From the FAT95 docs, you use different DosType values to select which partition you want.

Interesting as well... I've changed mine (I presume my DOSType was set for CrossDOS rather than Fat95), but changing it to 0x46415401 has made no difference - can still read and write the same disk with long filenames.

Yep, it's just a readme after all. ;-)