Drive A Not Drive A??

  • Thread starter Thread starter mrbog
  • Start date Start date
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mrbog

Hi I just got an old IDE zip 100 drive. On the back, it's label for
the jumpers is split into 2 boxes, labelled "Not Drive A" and "Drive
A". Each box shows three different jumper settings for how to set the
drive to slave/master/cable.

So in other words, there's six jumper settings on the back. Three for
"Drive A" - master/slave/cable and three for "Not Drive A" -
master/slave/cable which are different.

What does "Drive A" or "Not Drive A" mean? I don't know which jumper
settings diagram is right...
 
Hi I just got an old IDE zip 100 drive. On the back, it's label for
the jumpers is split into 2 boxes, labelled "Not Drive A" and "Drive
A". Each box shows three different jumper settings for how to set the
drive to slave/master/cable.

So in other words, there's six jumper settings on the back. Three for
"Drive A" - master/slave/cable and three for "Not Drive A" -
master/slave/cable which are different.

What does "Drive A" or "Not Drive A" mean? I don't know which jumper
settings diagram is right...
Click to expand...
Not sure as its a long time since I saw one of those drives, but you use
the "Drive A" jumpers if the BIOS of the PC you are installing on has
support for using Zip drives (almost all in the last few years do). You
will then see the drive as A: ie replacing the floppy.

If you use the other jumpers the drive will simply be seen as a
removable HDD.
 
Hi I just got an old IDE zip 100 drive. On the back, it's label for
the jumpers is split into 2 boxes, labelled "Not Drive A" and "Drive
A". Each box shows three different jumper settings for how to set the
drive to slave/master/cable.

So in other words, there's six jumper settings on the back. Three for
"Drive A" - master/slave/cable and three for "Not Drive A" -
master/slave/cable which are different.

What does "Drive A" or "Not Drive A" mean? I don't know which jumper
settings diagram is right...
Click to expand...

There is a bit of (dated) information on that here:
http://pw2.netcom.com/~deepone/zipjaz/atapi2.html

I wouldn't recommend using Drive A mode. Here is some more
information from an Iomega .pdf manual:

When emulating a floppy drive, the Zip drive’s firmware uses two
different formatting variations:

The ATA IDENTITY PACKET DEVICE Command (A1h) reports “Floppy” at
word offset 44

The drive adds 32 to all LBAs specified in all commands, thus
making the first 32 LBAs unaccessible and reducing disk capacity
by 16KB.

CAUTION If the drive is in drive A: mode and a disk is formatted
using an old version of Iomega Tools, the newly formatted disk will
be unreadable in other Zip drives. The old Iomega Tools, which does
not recognize drive A: mode, and will lay down a second 32 LBA
partition on the disk. All updated versions of Iomega Tools that
supports drive A: mode (including IomegaWare software) are backward
compatible and will support previous Iomega drives.
 
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