Cheapest solution for reading a 100MB Zip disk one time?

Velvis

Velvis

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A friend of mine has an old 100 MB zip disk with recipes on it. (He's not even 100% sure they are there.) Its nothing super important but he'd like to see if he can retrieve them without spending a fortune.
A quick look at Amazon showed one for $100 which is more than he wants to spend.
Any other suggestions?
 
Send it to someone who has a Zip drive. I have 2 or 3 sitting on a shelf; never tested them because I have no Zip disks, but I'm sure at least one has to work.
 
Even if this is a rare thing it might not hurt to buy it yourself and then you can access such media for people who need it.
 
I keep an external USB zip drive...and an external USB floppy drive...around just for such very rare instances where you need to read some old disks.
Since you're sort of a neighbor (about an hour 'n change north of me) and a Technibbler...you're welcome to snail mail me the zip disk..(or drive down if you're bored...I'm straight down i395) and if it's readable, I'll pull the contents and email to ya (or to your client).
 
YeOldeStonecat said:
I keep an external USB zip drive...and an external USB floppy drive...around just for such very rare instances where you need to read some old disks.
Click to expand...
I just added an external DVD drive to my toolset as well. At the rate they are disappearing, it won't be long until they are in the same category as floppies.
 
If disc drives didn't support most older formats I would say CD and DVD drives are for the majority already there.
 
If somebody isn't willing to spend $100 to get their data back, then why would you deal with them? $100 can't even give you a tank of gas and a single bag of groceries these days. Clients with unrealistic expectations are a nightmare. The cheap ones always demand the most and are the biggest pain in the butt.
 
Yeah those early ones were funny..."click...click ...click..." as it retracted the head and tried again...and again. I forget the max amount of counts. But yeah my external one here is a blue 250.

Anyone remember the Imation Superdisks? Tried to be competition. Basically a 120 meg floppy.
 
There were a ton of variants, but the only other one I remember getting any traction was the Superdisk LS-120 drive. Those were sold by Panasonic and Imation.
 
Ironically, got a call from a new customer today. He had bought an external zip drive and connected it to his modern computer and installed some drivers he downloaded from God knows where. His system wouldn’t boot. Was able to fix it by getting in the system restore and all was good.

I brought his zip drive home and the two discs and I am going to try to get the data off of them for him. The date on the zip drive is 1999, it’s blue, and it has (2) 25 pin ports. One of the ports looks like has a printer icon, and the other port is what he was plugged into. He also bought a five dollar USB to 25 pin/parallel adapter apparently.

What would be the best way to get this drive readable on a new or old PC?
 
Last edited:
Don't...get a modern drive that's got a full USB interface. Those old ones use a proprietary parallel link that will never work on anything younger than XP.
 
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