HELP! wierd zip drive / tape drive mixup

[denodave]

OK, here goes...

Machine is celeron466 on an Asus board, 60gb maxtor drive, Win98SE, 100mb zip internal ide, Hp Colorado T3000 tape drive (travan 2.5gb/5gb tape).

The tape drive was present when the O/S was installed, the zip drive was added later; the tape came with a ribbon that is apparently designed for it (has markings saying "to tape drive&quot that goes to the board's floppy connector. It also has a coupler (on the tape's ribbon) for the floppy drive ribbon to plug into.

The zip drive is attached as cable select to board's secondary ide connection, and registers in bios as the secondary slave.

I had a slight problem upon the first attempt to install the zip (no power), so I did it again. When I restarted the machine, the zip came up listed as Drive B: !!!

OK, I have never ever seen a zip register as a drive b: and I have installed Iomega hardware/software many many times. This is weird....

Back to the tape...I have never been able to get the machine to recognize this drive, even after installing a copy of the Colorado Backup software. I read the documentation and thought I had got it right, but it just doesn't want to be seen by the bios (or something?). It powers up fine and does the obligatory rewind/tensioning process upon booting up, but I can't seem to figure out the rest.

SOOOOOO, when the zip came up as drive b: I thought there might be something to it. HELP!!! ANY IDEAS OUT THERE?

Real men pray...especially techies!

 

[jexster]

Its dont a problem that it is reading as drive b: that just means you are running it as a secondary off your a: drive your computer is set up so that it can have two and obviously you have set it up off your a: drive so this means nothing as far as i know.You could try disconnecting you cdrom drive and plug it in there but i have a strong feeling that this will not make a difference.Do you have a big enough of a power suplly to run this becuse that could possibly be part of your problem.

 

[FatesWebb]

actuall if it was the TAPE drive on drive B I would agree however he said the zip was on B: and I also find that odd... there is some sort of conflict here I think. what if you just try one or the other do they work alone? and what drive letter is the zip at alone? cant you change the drive letter in the iomega tools? I think I remember that was in there somewhere FatesWebb

if you do what I suggested it is not my fault...

 

[denodave]

The answers to your queries are:

The tape drive acts the same no matter what; it is plugged in and powered up but not functional, nor does the bios see it.

Yes the zip drive is reconfigurable as far as its drive letter, but that's not the issue. The issue is (which I think you picked up on) WHY is the zip-drive assuming the drive letter that SHOULD be alloted to the tape drive??

Could it be that the machine "knows" that there is supposed to be a drive present (the tape is known but unidentified??)but couldn't translate the drive letter until the zip-drive was attached, and now it's alloting the drive slot to the zip by mistake?? It seems like the machine wants the tape to run as an IDE device so when it saw the zip it got "confused".

If this is the case, does it follows that there is some problem with the floppy interface? Or is there some sort of hardware lacking, like an interface card that allows both the floppy and the tape to run off the same interface but be recognized separately? Email me! denodave@yahoo.com
Real men pray...especially techies!