IDE ZIP100 Drive

[Polytropon]

On Tue, 23 Feb 2010 11:05:20 -0600, Programmer In Training <pit at joseph-a-nagy-jr.us> wrote:
> OK, upon a second reboot (for something unrelated), the device is
> detected (but I think only because I had the disk in the drive at the
> time). Now I'm having mount issues. First, it's entry in dmesg:
> 
> afd0: 95MB <IOMEGA ZIP 100 ATAPI 13.A> at ata0-slave PIO0

That look okay. By the way, it shouldn't matter if there's
actually a disk in the drive for the detection. The OS will
try to identify the media, or report "no media" if there
isn't a disk in the drive - but the drive will be present.



> I'm issuing the following command with the following results:
> 
> mount_msdosfs /dev/afd0 /mnt/zip
> mount_msdosfs: /dev/afd0: Invalid argument

For diagnostics, check the output of "fdisk afd0" to see
if the MBR partition data can be retrieved.

If you have an MS-DOS formatted media, I doubt that /dev/afd0
will be the correct device to access. Are there more /dev/afd0*
devices present? Maybe accessing /dev/afd0s1 will work. It
depends on the partitioning of the disk.

Then, a command like "mount_msdosfs /dev/afd0s1 /mnt/zip" should
be working correctly; consider using -noatime and useful
masks (-m, -M) because MS-DOS file systems can't deal with
file attributes properly.

If you're planning to use the ZIP drive with modern OSes
only - i. e. such understanding UFS file systems - then
you could format the disk with UFS, with a slice containing
the partition, or omiting the slice (dedicated)... just
an additional idea.



> I've tried afd1 through afd4, I just get
> no such file or directory errors.

Those devices are refering to a second, third, fourth and
fifth ZIP drive, which obviously isn't present.



> I'd like to use the zip drive to back up my private keys from GnuPG and
> other important data.

I wouldn't trust important data to a ZIP drive. I still
have "hardware virus" in mind, and a fast search revealed
this:

	"I like the fact that the old zip drives were
	vulnerable to the infamous "click of death".
	Leave it to Iomega to inadvertantly create
	what was essentially a hardware virus. We've
	lost two of our old zip drives in the office
	to "infected" zip disks. What are the odds of
	accidentally creating a device that can both
	damage itself and all other compatible devices
	it comes in contact with?

	Basically, it's a broken spring in the sliding
	aluminum part of the disc that would also damage
	any drive the disc was used in - those drives often
	times would end up damaging more discs - thereby
	spreading the problem. Damaged discs were usually
	totally unreadable without a little hardware hack
	that basically involved more or less taking them
	apart. Doesn't happen to the new drives, but the
	new discs can still break in the same way."

	http://www.consolecity.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-12717.html

Are you sure your drive isn't affected?

I've never owned a ZIP drive, so I can't speak from my
own experiences.



-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...