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Using the FAQ

The Table of contents below contains links to the answers given. From each answer, there is a link back to the table of contents, allowing you to navigate and find the information you are looking for.
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Table of contents 1. How to read Macintosh Zip cartridges on a PC? 2. How to read PC (MS-DOS) Zip cartridges on a Macintosh? 3. How to reformat a PC Zip cartridge on the Mac? 4. How to reformat a Macintosh Zip cartridge on the PC? 5. A valid Macintosh Zip cartridge can't be read by MacDisk 6. Which kind of Zip drives does MacDisk read? 7. The parallel port Zip drive is not seen in MacDisk

How to read Macintosh Zip cartridges on a PC?

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Real Macintosh Zip cartridges are HFS disks and can't be read on a PC without some tools. Our programs MacDisk manage those drives. See our specific page on Zip drives for more information.

How to read PC (MS-DOS) Zip cartridges on a Macintosh?

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Normally, all recent Macintosh computers should be able to mount MS-DOS Zip cartridges. Before Mac OS 8.5, only the short filenames were visible on the Mac. Some older drives had a firmware which was uncompatible with the File Exchange extension of the Mac OS.

How to reformat a PC Zip cartridge on the Mac?

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For some mysterious reasons, the Mac OS refuses to reformat MS-DOS Zip cartridges. Generally, you get the advice to reformat with Iomega Tools.
You can also do that with any other formatting tool. We use FWB toolkit and never had a single problem. Iomega Tools don't do something special that you could miss.

How to reformat a Macintosh Zip cartridge on the PC?

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Against what is often said, Iomega tools don't do anything special while formatting a cartridge. Therefore, just do a right click on the drive and select 'Format'.
You only have to use Iomega tools when the cartridge is write-protected (the write protection of Zip cartridges is not implemented in hardware (cursor or the like), but in software.

A valid Macintosh Zip cartridge can't be read by MacDisk

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For their "Tools" cartridges, Iomega use a special formatting scheme which mixes the MS-DOS and HFS sectors. When you install the tools for a platform, the other toolset is locked and the data space is (almost) recovered. When our programs get such a medium, they can't ascertain whether the cartridge is Mac or MS-DOS and refuse to open it, because they find a MS-DOS partition table in the first sector, where a Macintosh volume descriptor should be found.
You can test the 'Brute Force Search' item in the 'Expert' menu. The program will then scan the first sectors to find a valid volume header. Such cartridges should be reformatted as soon as possible.

Which kind of Zip drives does MacDisk read?

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MacDisk reads all types of Zip drives (100 and 250 Mb, on the IDE, SCSI or USB bus, as well as connected to the parallel port). To this end, the Aspi layer must be installed on the computer, even for non-SCSI drives (at the lowest level, they all appear as SCSI-like drives). The programm installer normally updates the Aspi layer. Please see also the ASPI FAQ for more information.
Under Windows 2000, the parallel port Zip drive and the USB Zip drives don't behave any more as a SCSI-like drive (against what happens under Windows 95/98/ME and NT 4). You should use version 5.3 or higher of MacDisk to manage successfully those drives.

The parallel port Zip drive is not seen in MacDisk

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Under Windows 2000, the parallel port Zip drive doesn't behave any more as a SCSI-like drive (against what happens under Windows 95/98 and NT 4). You should upgrade to the latest version of MacDisk (5.3).
On the other hand, under all other versions of Windows (95, 98, NT 4), it should only be a matter of correctly setting the Aspi layer. Please see the technical comments on the registry key in the ASPI FAQ. You can download our utility Aspitest to make the change. Launch the program, then check the Registry. If the program proposes to make a change, accept. Please see also our page on this utility AspiTest.
To accesse the Zip drive on parallel port under Windows 2000, you should use version 5.3 or higher of MacDisk.

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