Community archive
by thechas
I am not sure that it is even possible to boot from a ZIP drive.
Start with a simple test.
If you boot from a DOS floppy, can you access the ZIP drive?
If not, you may not be able to boot from the ZIP drive at all.
Next, try installing DOSmode drivers for the ZIP drive on the DOS boot disk, and see if you can now access the drive.
Then, there are the boot device limits for most motherboards.
The ZIP drive would need to be connected as either Primary IDE device 0 (master)
Or SCSI device 0
in order to be be recognized by the BIOS as a boot device.
I suspect that the only work-around will be to set up a DOS boot floppy that loads the DOS driver for the ZIP drive, and then executes a program on the ZIP disk.
Chas
by cactus pete
I sometimes forget to remove the IDE Zip disk when rebooting, and the system complains that the disk is not bootable. So I think it's possible.
The BIOS needs to be set such that it looks to that IDE device before the HD. For SCSI I have seen this done, though not for Windows. [NeXTStep 3.3, if you can believe it.]
Hey all...
Thanks for the follow-ups. It IS possible to boot to the zip drive using Norton Zip Rescue. However, that launches a bare-bones Windows environment and not DOS. We just got a new Gateway computer here at work, and it boots off of the zip just fine. It seems that the older motherboards don't like that -- they say that they WILL boot off of the zip, and you can make them do that in the bios, but in reality they won't do it. Hopefully this will get easier in the future...
This discussion is closed to new replies.
Sort by Trending