Iomega Zip Disc Drive: Power Mac G3 (B&W) w/ Mac OS 9.2.2

Assuming that the Zip drive is OK and the Zip 100 disk isn't damaged, I think you'd be better off using Iomega's IomegaWare "Tools" utility to erase/initialize a Zip disk. There are other "Tools" functions that are also useful, such as providing disk Information, which indicates disk type, format type, format life remaining, disk life remaining. You can also set up password protection for write protection or read/write protection for individual disks. The last compatible version for pre-OS X Macs (OS 8.6 -> 9.2.2) was "IomegaWare 3.0.4." Check Iomega's web site for availability now, as it was a free download for some time.

Correction: There was a newer release of IomegaWare - version 4.0.2 - for Mac OS 8.6->10.2. You can navigate to the download link by going to Iomega's Support page here. Select "Zip 100MB ATAPI/IDE" from the list of drives and when presented with the list of Windows OS versions, select "Any/Not Applicable" for the next prompt. Under the "Download Software & Drivers" heading, you'll have the option to select IomegaWare 4.0.2 for Mac.

I had nothing but troubles & Disk failures using IOmega's SW & Drivers on my Macs, once I got Intech's SpeedTools, all problems stopped, not sure you can find a version still, but not a single click of death after using that instead.

http://www.SpeedTools.com/HDInfo.html

I found that on my G4 (AGP) running OS 9.1 that using the Iomega Guest utiity worked much better than installing Iomega's suite of extensions. The Iomega Guest utility is (or at least was) included with Iomega Tools (or the IomegaWare collection).

When Iomega Guest is run, it temporarily loads the necessary extensions from within itself. These can be unloaded manually by selection in Iomega Guest once your Zip disk session is done; or will happen automatically when the machine is restarted.

I should have suggested that you find/download the older IomegaWare 3.0.4 - which I preferred over the newer 4.0.2. As I recall, the latter included an extra application & INIT in the Extensions folder (perhaps "QuikSync"), which ran in the background. This may be the application in use that you mentioned. I deleted that program and INIT, after installing the IomegaWare. If you're considering buying new Zip disks, I assume that you want to transfer/store files. Why not use a USB flash drive instead? A sale-priced 4GB drive costs less than $10 now, and it has 40x the storage capacity of a single 100MB Zip disk - which are quite expensive now at most retail office supply stores. The scarcity factor is behind their greed in overpricing a 3-pack of Zip 100 disks. In their prime (and before the advent of CD-R/RW drives), the Zip 100 and 250 drives were a convenient means of transferring a lot of large files from one computer to another. Now, the drives have become obsolete in terms of what they offer and what is available now. Just because your B&W G3 has an internal Zip drive (as does mine), I wouldn't recommend investing $$ in new disks. USB flash drives have no moving parts to cause problems and will prove to be more dependable over time, for long-term data storage.

Yeah, I think I remember Guest working far better, but the Intech Drivers iirc made Reads/Writes about 150% faster. 🙂

I even installed the Intech Drivers on a 64MB USB1.1 Flash Dive, copied OS9 to it, booted from the Flash Drive & was shocked that it wasn't all that much slower Booting/Running from the Flash Drive than the HDD on a 600MHz iMac G3! 🙂

I came across an option in Iomega Tools one day to make a bootable zip disk. Gave it a try, using a Zip100 disk on my G4 (AGP). It actually worked, albeit a bit slow.

The process used the installed OS 9.1 on the G4 as a source rather than using a CD installer, The System Folder was parsed severly to keep it small, but the result was a bootable Zip100 disk with space left over on it sufficient for one or two utilitiy apps like DiskWarrior.

Kept it aroound for a while mostly as a novelty, since I already had a small pocket-size firewire drive set up with a universal install of OS 9.2.1 and all the utilities and installers I could think of that I might need on an emergency boot disk. The universal install of OS 9.2.1 meant it would work on either my G4 (AGP) or my G4 (DA) machines.