Zip Drive help needed!

[xyth]

Wondering if anyone out there could help me figure out what I'm doing wrong... (probably something stupid).

I'm the proud owner of a second hand Zip Drive (model Z100Atapi) which I've hooked up to the 4xEIDE Buffered Interface on my A1200.

The drive happily reads and writes to PC formatted disks, thanks to the mountlist that came with the interface, but I am having problems preparing and formatting zip disks with FastFileSystem.

HDToolbox recognizes the drive correctly, and tells me there is just over 95 meg available space on a disk.

So I install (using settings read from the drive) and partition a disk (one big partition), but everytime I try to format such a disk it is treated as a normal floppy disk and there is only 880k available.

Which is quite annoying.

I've tried various mountlists from the Aminet (ZipStandard, NewZipMount) but with no success.  All these give me are two mounted volumes (ZIP: and DF6:) with which to access the drive - both of which are still only 880k in size.

What am I doing wrong?

My system:  

Amiga 1200
DKB Mongoose 030/50 Accelerator w/16 meg Fast RAM
OS 3.5 and DOpus 5.82

[Desmon]

If you're using HDToolBox to prepare Zip disks, you won't need a mountlist at all. Under HDToolBox Zip disks are recognised just as any other HDD.

Assuming you named the disk "Zip" through HDToolBox, using the command
C:Format drive ZIP: name Zip NOICONS FFS
in a shell window should get it formatted okay.

[xyth]

No such luck.  If I follow those exact instructions, all that happens is that the Format command returns that the device or volume is not mounted.

The only way that I can access the device is via DF6: which seems to be automatically set up by 4xEIDE.driver or HDToolbox or both.  And DF6: only lets me have 880k disks.

From what I can gather the 4xEIDE.driver uses trackdisk.device rather than scsi.device to handle removable ATAPI drives (thus DF6:).

The format command seems to think that since trackdisk.device is involved that it's dealing with a floppy.  Same with DOpus Format command.

Yet it works with CrossDOS.

[MikeB]

You can use the following files to set-up your zip drive from aminet.

FreDS-Zip250.lha

Problem with setting zip drives up in HDtoolBox is they need to be mounted during boot.
using a mount list provided in the file above is easier.

OS3.9 also supports zip drives.

[iamaboringperson]

dont use the starndard format commands

use a special zip-drive one instead

download stuff from aminet - there is a site on the web for zip drives on the amiga - ill see if i can post a link soon...

...

ive actually tricked the thing into thinking a Z250 disk was a Z100!! and i used it in windows to try to reformat it to Z100, guess what? windows thought it was 100meg too!! :-D

[xyth]

SOLVED THE STUPID THING!

Well, I at least found a more effective alternative.

Turned out that despite being listed as trackdisk.device unit 6, I could also access the drive as scsi.device unit 2.

And so I used the DOSDrivers from the ZipStandard package (on Aminet) with this as the device and unit number and -voila!- 95M zip disks in FFS!

Yay!

I did find too that only Quick formats will work, full formats couldn't handle the device.  Neither could HDToolbox.

Thanks to everyone for their suggestions.

Anyone know a good program to format PC zips with?  I'm currently using FormatZip from Aminet.  It works, but it's not perfect (reset required to recognize newly formatted disks).

And one more thing: should I be using the Directory Cache option of FFS on Zip disks (or my Hard Drive for that matter)?


Cheers,
   Morgan.