Introduction
Our program MacDisk was tested with all types of Zip drives (SCSI, parallel port, IDE/ATAPI and USB, 100 and 250 MB).

SCSI Zip drives
The SCSI Zip drives are quite normal SCSI devices and behave normally when instructed to execute the various SCSI commands. The only caveat is to install the latest Aspi layer (version 4.57 [1008] or higher). If your SCSI bus is heavily loaded, we suggest putting the Zip drive in the middle of the chain and not using the internal terminator of the drive.

IDE/ATAPI Zip drives
The IDE/ATAPI drive behaves like a SCSI drive under Windows 95/98 and NT. The Aspi layer should be updated. Please note that some versions of the firmware (14D and less) declare the drive as a floppy drive and not as a disk drive. You can observe this behavior in the Explorer, since the drives appears as a floppy drive B: and not as a disk D: or higher. Those drives don't execute correctly all SCSI commands. Please download our TestScsi utility (length 44 KB). Run it on your computer and test all commands after selecting the Zip drive. If you can read data from a Macintosh cartridge, our programs should work. If not, try to get a more recent model. Any feedback appreciated!
You should also check that the drive is correctly set (Master or Slave), depending on your IDE bus.

Parallel port Zip Drives
When the drive is correctly installed (that is, is not run with the guest utility alone), it behaves like a quite normal SCSI drive. Don't forget to update the Aspi layer.
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 version 5.3 or higher to access those drives.

USB Zip drives
We also tested our programs on the new USB Zip drives. Those drives behave quite normally like SCSI drives and we had no difficulty to read/write/format disks as Macintosh volumes. Please note nevertheless that those drives are not really USB drives, since they need their own power supply and they use non-standard connectors. More, the drive has no connectors to chain other devices.
Under Windows 2000, the USB drives aren't considered as SCSI devices by the system. You should upgrade to version 5.3 or higher of MacDisk to access those drives.

FAQ on Zip drives
We also publish on this site a FAQ on some aspects of using Zip cartridges to transfer data and files between Macintosh and PC.