Support for Iomega Zip drives?

Hi, Scott -

Internal Zip drives (ATA bus) are supported natively starting with at least OS 8.5.1 (that's the original OS for the B&W G3, which had an option for an internal Zip drive).

External Zip drives could be used with earlier Macs, but they connected via SCSI. I used such drives with my PowerMac 4400/200 and Performa 6210 and 6360 machines, all of which originally came with OS 7.5.x.

Iomega supports their Zip (and other) drives via Iomegaware for OS 8.6 and later. You can download it (free) from this Versiontracker page -
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/mac/2205

Hi, Scott -

Is OS 7.5 supposed to have built in Zip support? Or was that maybe added with OS 7.5.3 or 7.5.5?

I'm not sure. The earliest OS I have available for examination is the update for OS 7.6.1 - it includes the Iomega Driver extension.

I don't know about System 7.5, but I have a PowerMac 6500/300 that came with both System 7.6.1 and an internal ZIP drive. I think you do need to download some drivers from Iomega to get it to work however. I do know that when I tried a clean install of OS 8 some years back, I couldn't use the ZIP drive. I think I also had to upgrade the ZIP drivers at some point, but I can't remember if it was when I upgraded to OS 8, applied the 8.1 patch, or upgraded to 8.5 and applied the 8.6 patch.

All I know is that you can use both the internal and the external ZIP drives with 7.6.1 if you download a driver from Iomega. Weather or not you can still do so is another issue. I could extract them from the RestoreCD, but it wouldn't have an installer.