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0 pointswanderingjew5y ago0 comments

For anyone buying this, please keep in mind USB-ATAPI floppy drives are especially broken in nearly all modern OSes.

I'm speaking from experience with ZIP drives, including the internal ATAPI and IDE versions. Support for Linux was dropped a while ago, but you can load that in as a Kernel module. I still haven't gotten that to work.

Current Win10 install kinda works, but the best success I've had is with an old 32-bit installation of WinXP. Even then, doing the things you'd like to do with a floppy drive (reading reliably, reading when inserted, decoupling the unmount/eject ((as opposed to the old way Mac handled it))) mechanism is difficult. Also, some USB->ATAPI bridges simply don't work with ATAPI floppy devices.

If you've ever wanted to solve a problem that no one else has attempted (because no one cares, at all) there's a project for you.

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Gregordinary5y ago

Thanks for confirming my suspicions with this comment. Was just messing with an internal Zip-750 drive. I tried both SATA to IDE adapters and an internal USB to IDE adapter. I tried with two different drives using Ubuntu 20.04 and jazip.

With both drives there was a brief moment the the zip disk showed up, once. Then never again.

I eventually just purchased a PCIe IDE controller card and that works as expected.

tracker15y ago

I did get a USB floppy drive a few years ago... don't even know for sure if/where I have it as I never actually used it... got it just in case I needed to get some data off for friends/family, but that use case never presented itself... I'd moved off of all floppy media by 2001.

It's wild when I hear/read about production systems still running with old floppy media.

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