Number 199 - December 1999

Stuck ZIP Disk
by Gina Smith, Access Magazine
Q. Somehow I managed to get a cartridge stuck in my Zip drive. Short of taking it into the shop, is there anything I can do?1     Pete Peyton, Antioch, Calif.     A. There probably is. But first, make sure that your system is getting power. If your Zip drive and your computer aren't turned on, the Eject button won't work.     Turn everything off and on again and try to pop out the cartridge one more time.     No luck? Check the back of the drive (or the front, if it's an internal drive) for a little hole called the Emergency Eject Mechanism--I kid you not. You should be able to slip the point of a paper clip in there and pop the cartridge right out.2 If that works, check the cartridge for damage. Iomega drives come with a handy diagnostic program to do this.3 You can find it by clicking on the Zip icon in your My Computer folder. If you have a Mac, check in your Iomega folder.     If the cartridge is still stuck, or if it only comes out halfway, don't force it. It's best at this point to ring up tech support for help, and take the drive into the shop.     Removable cartridge drives from other vendors are also likely to have an "emergency eject" pinhole, though it may be located in a different place. Check your manual for details.	TOGGLE Editor's Notes:     1 I moved my external Iomega ZIP drive from my '486 running Windows 3.1 to my new Pentium III. I went to the Iomega website and downloaded updated drivers to install it for Windows 98.4 Installation placed an Iomegaware icon on my screen. I also had a disk hang up and not eject when I pressed the Eject button. Clicking on the icon on my desktop opens an Iomega window on screen. If there is a disk in the drive, clicking the picture of the Zip drive in the upper left of the window causes a menu to drop down with choices: Open, Read, Find, Eject. That last one did the trick. However, if there is no disk in the drive, you won't get the dropdown menu.     2 The pin hole on the back of my Zip drive is above the parallel port available for daisy-chaining another parallel device, such as a printer.     3 See also Steve Gibson's Trouble in Paradise at Gibson Research website, http://grc.com. You can download his free program TIP.EXE and use it to analyze your ZIP drive and disks. Be aware that it takes about an hour to analyze one disk. I could not get TIP.EXE to run under Windows 3.1.     4 Go to: http://www.iomega.com. Click on software downloads and select iomegaware 2.0 for Windows 95/98.     The ZIP 250 MB drive can also read from and write to 100 MB Zip disks, but , of course, the 100MB drive cannot read/write the 250MB disks.
Number 199 - December 1999