I could use some input about lifting data from old Zip disks.

Okay, story time and then lots of questions, if I may.

Recently I've been very active on the Amiga platform again largely due to acquiring an Amiga 600 and Vampire card. This lead to completely revamping my old A1200 with all the modern bells and whistles available today. I found my old 100MB Iomega Zip disks of which I'm sure they were formatted for the Amiga and hold unknown data. (Might be mods from the time and Deluxe paint art I did)

My younger foolish self threw out a perfectly working SCSI Zip drive, because come on: 100MB, yeah right... A decision I regret today. In my haste to get to that data I bought a secondhand
Zip drive only to realise when it arrived that it’s the parallel version which doesn’t play nice with the Amiga printer port. I have a SquirrelSCSI, so I was aiming for the SCSI version.

Here are the questions:

-I know you can build a modified cable to connect to the parallel drive (ppazip on Aminet) but this involves additional purchases with a risk you blow up the amiga.
Does anyone know of a place I can buy a ready made and tested cable?

-An alternative option, if it works, would be a USB->Parallel cable, connected to a Win10 PC (It’s an Intel NUC so adding parallel PC Cards isn’t an option) and mount the zip disks in WinUAE as HDD’s to lift the data from the disks. Anyone know if this is a viable scenario? This would be the cheapest option, already got the Zip drive just need the cable.

-I also own a IDE/ATAPI Zip drive, I could buy a 4xEIDE'99 interface from amigastore.eu but it’s 53 Euro without shipping, rather expensive for a possible 1 time use and only needing 2 out of 4 IDE ports.

Any other advice or options you could give me? Would be enormously appreciated.

[Jope]

USB to parallel will not work with anything but a printer.

Perhaps use the ATAPI Zip drive and a PC and dump raw images of the disks, then work from those? USB <-> PATA cables exist and are rather cheap.

[amigoun]

I make the PPAZIP adapters and they work quite well. If you are interested look at my thread here.

Originally Posted by Jope

USB to parallel will not work with anything but a printer.

Perhaps use the ATAPI Zip drive and a PC and dump raw images of the disks, then work from those? USB <-> PATA cables exist and are rather cheap.

USB <-> PATA, of course like you have USB to SATA. Didn't consider that option. Thanks you, I'll get right on that.

Originally Posted by amigoun

I make the PPAZIP adapters and they work quite well. If you are interested look at my thread here.

Only 15 Euro! I'll be ordering 1 right away. Combined with a USB/PATA cable I'll have access on all my devices. Cool

[mark_k]

If I were you, I'd buy a USB Zip drive and connect that to a PC. They're not too expensive on eBay, you could probably get one for £10-£20. Then just image your old disks on the PC for safekeeping.