Windows 7 does not see my Zip Drive

[kimco52]

I upgraded (?) my video editing system and am still in the basic stages. Mostly all new stuff.
ASUS P6TSE motherboard with Intel i7-930 Quad Processor
NVidia FX1700 Dual monitor card
Serial ATA: C, D, F drives.....boot on C, Blue Ray Burner on N
PATA: one cable with Pioneer DVD writer on M
SIIG PATA card. One Cable has two drives, E, F Other cable has Iomega Zip

Windows 7 Professional, 64 bit

When booting computer, BIOS for the SIIG shows the three drives, BIOS for MB shows the DVD burner
When finished booting, the Zip drive is not in My Computer or Computer Disk Management.

If I swap the DVD writer with the Zip Drive, BIOS shows the zip drive as an ATAPI device Still does not appear in My Computer or Computer Disk Manager.

I built OS with only the C-Drive on SATA and both the Zip(slave) and DVD-ROM (master) on motherboard PATA. When built, it recognized and assigned a letter to zip drive.

When I added the SIIG card with two drives, it no longer put the MB PATA devices in My Computer even though it recognized them in BIOS Swapping positions (swap cable plug ins) It only recognized the zip and DVD from SIIG but the other drives were not recognized on MB in Win7 but were detected in BIOS.
The SIIG card does have Win7 drivers inside Win7. I called SIIG and did tests they suggested and they said the card is working.

I found by trial and error that I can get all but zip drive recognized if I put both disks on one cable on SIIG card and the DVD ROM on the other cable.
I know this sounds strange but evidently all six potentials don't work together for some strange reason.
I have gone through the BIOS setup and can't seem to find anything there and currently have scratched all the rest of the hair off the top of my head.
What am I missing? Any ideas?

Also, haven't figured sharing out on the computer, either. I have set allthings up for sharing but clicking on a drive, it says not shared and the Share button is grayed out. This is not as easy as XP. What am I missing here, also.

[redwudz]

I think I would try a different PATA adpater card. Not all cards work with all devices.

[kimco52]

I previously used a Promise Ultra133 card but it does not work with Windows 7. I tried the Windows Vista 64 drivers because in some cases, those work for some devices, but it gave an error message that it could not start. I called Promise and they said that was a known problem but they don't have drivers for Win7 for that card and don't plan on having any. In other words, go find another card. The only one I found was the SIIG card. If there is another card, I don't know about it.

The SIIG card is an Ultra133 PCI card. There may be some compatibility issues but right now, I don't know what that may be.

[anaboland]

could try..

http://www.startech.com

Their IDE controllers have Win 7 cert, i use the 1 port pci express controller on win 7 64bit with no problems, it uses a JMicron controller chip.

The 2 port versions may help you, but i don't know what chip set they use.

[kimco52]

According to their website, they are sold by a store about 1 mile from my house. Didn't know they existed tucked in a back corner. I'll stop by in the morning and see what they have. I only saw one card with PCI-E and that is the single channel card you mentioned. If that one port (2 devices) works with the motherboard's 2 devices, that would be sufficient.

[anaboland]

Part number:- PEXSAT2IDE2

Is PCI express and has 2*IDE connections, as well as eSata and Sata...

[ranchhand]

Just FYI and another thing to consider, is that these Iomega Zip Drives are really old, haven't been manufactured for decades, and are notorious for dieing. If you have really valuable data on the zip disks I suggest backing it up onto a hard drive or external. That drive is nearing end-of-life usage.

[RabidDog]

IS a zip drive and WIN7 compatible? Have you actually used it in WIN7 beyond it just being recognized? It is ancient tech and V. notorious .. I would get it going once (xp?)) to get your data off then I would sell it off to a collector. 250mb zips or even older 100mb ?? ok in their day but superceded by Cd-RW, oh and by DVD-RW, oh and by Blu-ray storage, oh and by usb sticks.

[redwudz]

I have a stack of them, in 100MB and 250MB, parallel, SCSI, USB and a couple of internal IDE versions and a 2GB Jaz SCSI version. Also a 250MB Photoshow one from Iomega . I haven't tried any with W7, but they worked with XP. I mostly used mine with a Amiga and a PowerMac computer. In their day they were a good storage device, but I would also move any data off them to something more modern. I think inexpensive USB flash drives pretty much killed them.

[kimco52]

I think it is beyond just the Zip drive. I got the Startech card anaboland said to try and it had similar strange results. All drives show up in the correct positions during the BIOS starts but don't necessarily show up in Windows My Computer or in Disk Management. Strange things go on. Sometimes the DVD writer shows up correctly sometimes it shows up as a different drive letter which you cannot change and it does not have the correct name.
According to the Iomega site, the Zip drive should work with Win 7. This drive worked great under XP Pro. I have Zip drives in 2 other computers and I guess I can use them to get files off as I need them and move them to the main computer via the network.
However, something is going on with this system that I can't seem to put my finger on. It was a clean fresh install and I haven't added anything other than the drives I stated above. I have not loaded any software other than Windows, yet. I won't add any apps stuff until the OS in working correctly. I did load Promise drivers for Vista, thinking that would work but since I took the card out, maybe my next step is to try and remove those drivers if I can figure out where they are and how to do that.

[ranchhand]

something is going on with this system that I can't seem to put my finger on

Couple of questions: Did you load the Windows 7 32 or 64 bit mainboard/chipset drivers for that board? Sometimes the generic drivers in W7 do ok, but the computer gets "fussy" about doing odd things every so often. Next, considering that it is a new install this is not probable, but you can consider running a Hijack this log to see if anything dodgy turns up. And run the latest Malwarebytes just to make double-sure. Just a suggestion...

[redwudz]

Sort of obvious, but did you make sure the jumpers on the zip and optical drives are set correctly, master and slave? That can cause odd problems.

W7 has most drivers already. But you can uninstall drivers in the Device Manager.

[kimco52]

The jumpers on the drives are set correctly and I tried with several combinations.
I put the motherboard CD into the computer and it loaded all the stuff from the CD. Even some Easy Gate program that lets you jump to an application, bypassing BIOS setup and normal load. That comes up the first thing when turning on. It has a timeout feature or you can exit it and it starts the normal POST and boot sequence. I always click bypass but may just install it.
I checked the "installed" programs in Control Panel and Promise was not listed.
Once again, booting up this morning, The individual drives show up in the BIOS for each card and all drives are shown with correct names. When booted, I check Mycomputer and I am missing the ZIP and sometimes the DVD. If I go to Device Manager, under disk drives, All drives are listed, including the Zip drive and they all show as working correctly. They are all using a driver from Win7. Both the DVD and Blue Ray burners are listed correctly, also. However, they do not show up in My computer or in Disk Manager.
So, Windows OS knows they are there but does not assign them a letter to be used. That is what I do not understand. They show up in Device Manager as working correctly.

Also, currently, It takes forever to do a Shutdown. Minutes. I give up and shut it off. It didn't do that a couple days ago. It shut down quickly.

[kimco52]

Well, I decided to go back to ground one with minimum attachments. Just the Zip and the DVD and the C drive. I got everything working correctly adding one at a time, except the Zip Drive. It even shuts down quickly, now. Digging further, I discover that Win7-64 is the only version that currently does not support that particular drive. It will work with Win7-32. So, I just unplug it and things seem to be correct. I'll leave it that way and move on.

Thanks for all your support and suggestions. And, I am keeping the PCI-E board in it for the extra drives. It works (the SIIG card probably does too, but....) so I'll just leave it that way.

[cd090580]

Mine is working fine.

But if there is no disk in the drive, it doesn't show in explorer....

[kimco52]

Mine is working fine.

But if there is no disk in the drive, it doesn't show in explorer....

Are you running Windows 7 - 64 bit Version OS?
If so, what did you do to get it to work? Where did you get drivers for it?

Supposedly, Iomega submitted driver stuff to Microsoft to include. Evidently, Microsoft has not added it to their package and updates. I have installed all current upgrades from Microsoft.

[Cornucopia]

I know you think the main problem is drivers & device recognition, and it may be, but the ULTIMATE goal is data access (and SAFETY). Don't hold on to those Zips just because SO FAR thay've been OK for you.

I should know.

I started getting Zips at the production company I worked for as soon as they became available, and we used them all the time. 100MB, 250MB, 1GB Jaz, 2GB Jaz. Internal & External drives. Scores of drives and hundreds of disks.

Then things started happening...

Do a google search on "click of death". Once it starts happening, AND IT ALWAYS DOES SOONER OR LATER, the corruption can pass from drive to disk to drive to disk, ruining your whole collection if you don't pay attention.

We went through 2 or 3 drives and about 10-12 disks before I called a halt to using them.
And then I spent many hours trying to get what data we could off the disks and onto CD-R, DVD-R and HD removeables.
Then we made duplicates of those (just in case) and got a good disc catalogging software so we could pull them from the library (nearly) instantly.

Disk access time is much better now, compatibility with other users is much more likely, and our extinction rate is rediculously low (CD-Rs from 1996 still working) - mainly because we used high quality media.

We stopped using Iomega products around 2005-2006 after having used them for ~9 years.

Summary: If you value the data, get them off those disks NOW while you can (using an XP computer). That'll kill 2 birds with one stone because you won't even have to worry about the drives showing up.

Learned my lesson the hard way,
Scott