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Published at 11.7.1998
Author: Ronny Ziegler
Translator: Andy Ziegler
Languages: de nl
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Zip drive

Zip-Laufwerk Everyone who often moves data and does not want to burn a CD every time cannot live without them: the small helper, the Zip disk.
Even under Linux Zip works and you easily evade the small zones of problems with this article.
The Zip at the parallel port
To support the Zip at the parallel port you probably have to compile the kernel. The kernel has to support the following options: 
  • SCSI support
    • SCSI support
    • SCSI Disk support
  • SCSI low-level drivers
    • IOMEGA Parallel Port Zip drive SCSI support
With this kernel you should talk to your Zip drive.

Enter a Zip disk and reboot the kernel. During booting the kernel you should see a text similar to the following one:
 

File: /var/log/boot.msg
scsi: 1 host
Vendor: IOMEGA Model: ZIP 100 Rev: N*32
Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 02
Detected scsi disk sda at scsi0, channel 0, id 6, lun 0
scsi : detected 1 SCSI disk total.
SCSI device sda: hdwr sector= 512 bytes.
Sectors= 196608 [96 MB] [0.1 GB]
sda: Write Protect is off
Partition check:
sda: sda4

Now you are able to mount the Zip drive. It is recommended to create a destination directory first:

>> mkdir /mnt/zip

and then mount the drive with:

>> mount /dev/sda4 /mnt/zip
/dev/sda is the SCSI device which is used to communicate with the drive. If you have already used internal SCSI drives you may use /dev/sdb4 or sdc4 instead. You find the  correct device name in the last line of the file /var/log/boot.msg (see above: sda: sda4) 

Now you are able to use the Zip drive as similar as a normal hard disk. It is also possible to format the Zip disk in the ext2 format.

>> fdisk /dev/sda
Print and Zip, Zip and print?

Of course you recognized that the Zip drive and the printer are connected with the same port. They both use the parallel port and that's the reason why you should use "Parallelport-sharing". But this feature has not been supported by Linux yet. You are just able to use the Zip drive or the printer but not both. The nicest possibility to solve this problem is a modular kernel. If you want to print you load the module for lp if you want to use the Zip drive you unload the lp module and load the Zip module instead. 
 
 

Overview
Info http://www.torque.net/~campbell/
Iomega http://www.iomega.com
Zip FAQ http://earth.cnct.com/home/steveg/zip.html


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