Old Iomega Parallel Port Disk Drive Assembly and Linux Driver
I have an old Iomega parallel port disk drive that I wanted to hook up to my GNU/Linux box. It has been a long times since I used it, and I needed to open it up to adapt a new power supply directly from the computer. The drive runs on 5 volts. There doesn't appear to be a regulator in the disk drive, but there is certainly abundant 5 volt power available on most PCs. There are no screws, just pop off the cover by prying at four points in the seam of the case:
Watch out for the two springs on the drive tray:
The rails fit so that the clip on the side fits against the rail. The other side is rotated around with a sensor switch:
Here is how this all looks with the disk inserted:
To get this to work with the Linux kernel, select these two options:
CONFIG_SCSI_PPA=y
CONFIG_SCSI_IZIP_EPP16=y
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This is the old style PPA driver. Here is what the output of dmesg looks like:
ppa: Version 2.07 (for Linux 2.4.x)
ppa: Found device at ID 6, Attempting to use EPP 16 bit
ppa: Found device at ID 6, Attempting to use SPP
ppa: Communication established with ID 6 using SPP
scsi1 : Iomega VPI0 (ppa) interface
Vendor: IOMEGA Model: ZIP 100 Rev: D.08
Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 02
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Usually the partition is 4, but it could be something different. Use fdisk to tell if you want:
root@sv-53 root]# fdisk /dev/sdd
Command (m for help): p
Disk /dev/sdd: 100 MB, 100663296 bytes
64 heads, 32 sectors/track, 96 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 2048 * 512 = 1048576 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdd4 * 1 96 98288 6 FAT16
Command (m for help): q
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Mount the partition:
[root@sv-53 root]# mount -t vfat /dev/sdd4 /mnt
[root@sv-53 root]# ls -l /mnt
total 83920
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 85934080 Aug 10 2002 zs.tar
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Pretty sure this is an old ZipSlack tarball. Check it out. It is a way to get GNU/Linux to run entirely off of a Zip disk. The advantage is that a Zip disk is R/W, unlike the CDROM distributions:
[root@sv-53 root]# tar -tf /mnt/zs.tar | head -n 5
linux/
linux/faq.txt
linux/linux.bat
linux/loadlin.exe
linux/README.1st
[root@sv-53 root]#
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Yeah, it is ZipSlack.
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