New to WinUAE - seeking help with USB Zip 100

Hello there, I am throwing this question out after looking fairly extensively for a similar problem here and in a general google search. Many of the threads are close but I'm new to WinUAE (V 3.4.0) and none quite give the level of detail to fix the issue at least for a newbie to the emulator.

So to quickly explain, I have about a dozen older Zip 100 Amiga formatted disks that contain a bunch of historical backups from my Amiga 2000 SCSI setup. I was hoping to take a look at what was on them under WinUAE but I have two issues.

1. They were created on a computer that no longer works and the SCSI version of the Zip drive died a few years ago.

2. I was given by a friend a working version of a Zip 100 USB drive but I can't seem to figure out how to mount it from the WinUAE side?

After reading the various threads I could find, it seems that it's possible to mount the USB Zip drive from the emulator but I just can't figure it out.

My PC sees the drive and it works fine with the few extra FAT Formatted drives (PC) I have and it shows a drive when I insert one of my Amiga formatted drives but it's obviously displayed with garbled folder and file names due to the file system incompatibility.

Is there anyone that might be able to help with sort of a step by step process to mount the USB Zip drive from inside of WinUAE? I'm a bit rusty on my Amiga OS but it's coming back, but the emulator throws a few extra things that I'm just not familiar with. I have managed to get it to boot with 3.1 emulating an A4000 040. However it doesn't seem to see the USB drive from within WinUAE?

Sorry if that's a bit wordy, I'm just trying to paint the picture so to speak. Any help will be greatly appreciated. Or obviously if it's been answered before and I just missed it please point me to the right message thread and I can figure it out from there.

Thanks all,
Dan

[emufan]

your post made me try to rescue one of my 17 yrs old zip 100 disk.
I also have a USB Zip 100 drive.

before I do any mounting in winuae, i did a copy of the whole disk using winuae.

goto WinUAE -> CD & Hard Drives -> Add Hard Drive ...

here you select your IOmega zip drive and "Create Hard Disk Image File"

I think this is the 1st important step, before you try to mount any of the old zip disks.

---> before you try to backup the important disks, make some test runs with an unimportant disk,
maybe this does help to clean the heads - dunno if it's good to do so, but it cannot be wrong.

i have no clue what to do next, but the disk is preserved

#1) the disk I rescued was an empty disk, with FAT filesystem.
the image i could mount with OSFmount.
using Recuva i could undelete a 90mb zip archive. written in 1999

[emufan]

a 2nd zip disk with FAT filesystem stops at 10% with unknown error 4.
i'm sure there are some more sophisticated image backup apps out there.
can anyone make some suggestions?

#1) thats interesting:
after using a filebased recovery tool ( EaseUS Zip Data Recovery) - did some scans and rescued all files it could find,
i again tested winuae image backup - and now it does advance and made a 100% backup.

again some files undeleted, but they were all bad.

#2) 3rd disk is really bad. weird click from the drive, winuae stops at 4% with unknown error 4,
EaseUS find files in deep scan, but cannot recover files.

next i tried to format the zip and this does fail too. (full and fast format).

those clicks from the Zip drive are really scary :/

#3) good news: after all the clicks and noise from the drive with the bad disk,
it still reads the first disk 100% successfully.

[mark_k]

The problem with most programs which create disk image files, is that they stop on encountering an error. Meaning that the rest of the disk is not read, even if most/all of the rest is error-free.

If you can use Linux, ddrescue is designed to handle reading media which may have errors. There's also the similarly-named dd_rescue.

It's definitely worth imaging all your old Zip disks, because the data on them has a limited life-span.