FAQ on Zip cartridges and drives
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| How to read Macintosh Zip cartridges on a PC? | Back to ToC |
Real Macintosh Zip cartridges are HFS disks and can't be read on a PC without some tools. Our programs MacDisk manage those drives. See our specific page on Zip drives for more information.
| How to read PC (MS-DOS) Zip cartridges on a Macintosh? | Back to ToC |
Normally, all recent Macintosh computers should be able to mount MS-DOS Zip cartridges. Before Mac OS 8.5, only the short filenames were visible on the Mac. Some older drives had a firmware which was uncompatible with the File Exchange extension of the Mac OS.
| How to reformat a PC Zip cartridge on the Mac? | Back to ToC |
For some mysterious reasons, the Mac OS refuses to reformat MS-DOS Zip cartridges. Generally, you get the advice to reformat with Iomega Tools.
You can also do that with any other formatting tool. We use FWB toolkit and never had a single problem. Iomega Tools don't do something special that you could miss.
| How to reformat a Macintosh Zip cartridge on the PC? | Back to ToC |
Against what is often said, Iomega tools don't do anything special while formatting a cartridge. Therefore, just do a right click on the drive and select 'Format'.
You only have to use Iomega tools when the cartridge is write-protected (the write protection of Zip cartridges is not implemented in hardware (cursor or the like), but in software.
| A valid Macintosh Zip cartridge can't be read by MacDisk | Back to ToC |
For their "Tools" cartridges, Iomega use a special formatting scheme which mixes the MS-DOS and HFS sectors. When you install the tools for a platform, the other toolset is locked and the data space is (almost) recovered. When our programs get such a medium, they can't ascertain whether the cartridge is Mac or MS-DOS and refuse to open it, because they find a MS-DOS partition table in the first sector, where a Macintosh volume descriptor should be found.
You can test the 'Brute Force Search' item in the 'Expert' menu. The program will then scan the first sectors to find a valid volume header. Such cartridges should be reformatted as soon as possible.
| Which kind of Zip drives does MacDisk read? | Back to ToC |
MacDisk reads all types of Zip drives (100 and 250 Mb,
on the IDE, SCSI or USB bus, as well as connected to the parallel port).
| Back to ToC |
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