[tech] Recovering history

[Alex Dawson]

Hi Cyril,

Apple has used four disk formats over the years - MFS (1984-1986), HFS (1986-1998), HFS+ (1998-2017), and now APFS. Mojave still supports HFS, so it is unlikely to be the cause of the issue, but I did have issues recently with Mojave reading from HFS floppies, and had to use Catalina. What error, if any, do you see when you try to mount the drive?

Zip drives came in 100, 250 and 750MB. USB versions of all were available. Larger capacity drives can read all smaller capacity disks. 

A common problem with Zip drives is read/write heads breaking and shredding the disks, which in turn will break the heads of other drives. If you pull back the metal shield on the disk and look into it, does the flexible platter look flat, or damaged at all?

Best Regards,
--
Alex Dawson



--
Alex Dawson
+61 4 3344 DUCK (+61 433443825)
> On 6 Jul 2020, at 12:18 pm, Cyril Edwards <c.edwards at westnet.com.au> wrote:
> 
> Hi
> 
> I am currently and Hon Senior Research Fellow in Physics at UWA.  I retired as Head of Department in 2000 and I’m trying to recover data from a number of old Zip250 and Zip100 disks.  I have found my old Zip100 Drive and my (somewhat younger) Zip250 drive but neither allow me to access the data. Andrew Gozzard has suggested that you may still have some Iomega equipment and may be able to help me.
> 
> As you know the Zip100 drive has a parallel output.  I no longer have any gear to deal with SCSI  … so even though it powers up OK, I can’t talk to it with my MacBook Pro (Mojave 10.14.6).
> 
> The Zip 250 has a USB output so it it could in principle read the data.  But, although this powers up from the USB port, it doesn’t read the data.  Thinking that this may be because Mojave is too recent for this 20-30 year old system (!) I’ve tried it on an older Laptop running Snow Leopard 10.6.8.  No joy.
> 
> Do you think that you can help in any way please?
> 
> Cheers, Cyril
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