Does MorphOS handle zip drives? I have some old zip disks and dunno what is on there. Can I even use this with a G5 PowerMac?

Take a look at a thread I started a while ago ( 3-Nov-2013) which may answer your question.

https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?topic_id=9641&forum=3#106535

Thanks!

I never had any trouble using my internal ZIP drive, in my MDD G4 PowerMac when running MorphOS. No 3rd party driver or mountlist was required to get it working, just connected it to one of the PowerMac's internal IDE cables, IIRC.

Yes that's OK for a 'big-box' Mac, but for a Mac Mini and a Powerbook installing something onto the IDE is quite difficult.

So I had to use a USB version of the ZIP drive, which does not get mounted automatically it seems, certainly not with Amiga Formatted ZIP disks, which is why I added the information to the thread as I discovered what worked and didn't work as I resolved the issues for myself, and hope it is/was helpful for others who wanted to use a ZIP drive with such hardware.

Finding a ZIP drive is hard..at least on Amazon it is.. they are expensive as hell.

Quote:

I guess I should have read through all of the previous messages more carefully. I did not realize the reason for your mountlist entries, so thanks for clearing it up for me. Glad you figured it out. I have a couple of USB ZIP drives and thought that I had used them connected to one or more of my MorphOS systems without any problems, but my memory may be (is usually) faulty. It is going to take me months or years to unpack and find where all of my gear is after my massive move, so right now, I don't even know which box my USB ZIP drives are located. IIRC, I have both a 100mb and 250mb external USB ZIP drive. As you wrote, mounting ZIP disks which have previously been formatted on an Amiga system might be harder to accomplish.

Quote:
I bought a few USB ZIP drives a few years ago, expecting the price to go up, as well as them becoming more scarce, and anticipating more diverse hardware for Amiga-like systems, to be able to transfer my data to them, even using Amiga Forever, if necessary, though they are of course also useful for Windows, and Mac hardware, which I also have, but they were/are predominantly for Amiga-like systems.

USb, internal IDE and external SCSI zipdrives all work fine with my powermac G4. I still use them a lot to transfer between windows7 and Amiga 3.x and alike. It's easier and cheaper compared to buying cfcards or usb and ethernet solutions for my collection of classic 68k amigas


[ Edited by Simon 22.01.2016 - 19:24 ]