Windows 7: Does driver exist to enable file access from old Iomega zip 100 drive?

I have a 64 bit Windows 7 computer and a large number of files on old zip 100 disks, which I would love to have access to again. My 100 drive is a USB drive.

Iomega's site says the following about that qualified for 32-bit Windows 7: "Zip® Drives: Zip® 100MB, 250MB or 750MB USB, ATAPI, FireWire or SCSI drives should work with native Windows 7 drivers. IomegaWare software does NOT work with Windows 7, so features supplied by IomegaWare will not be available."


"native" - so Windows 7 can simply accept the zip drive? that seems very wrong --- Furthermore Iomega can simply be referring to current Zip drives.


I am sorry my level of knowledge of computing is much below those of you on this site, (but I am learning! perhaps not apparent here) but I have been unable to find clear help on the web...


I would like to accomplish this by myself, but with any of your feedback, it may be clear I need to take the drive to a computer repair store. I am hesitant to just give it a go with further info for fear something will go quite wrong with my computer.
I appreciate your help on behalf of quite the novice. Thanks.

Since Iomega supported both 32 and 64 versions of Vista I'd say if your drive is not recognized by Windows 7 native drivers you may want to explore this https://iomega-na-en.custhelp.com/cg...b2RzPTEsMTkmcF

and try the Vista drivers in compatibility mode.

Is this the usb version or an internal version? I don't see why it wouldn't work off the bat if it is native. I personaly would plug it in and see what happens. If the PC won't boot or you run into any errors, unplug it. Just my thoughts though, I guess I am daring like that and would risk it by just hooking it up and see what does.

Geeve

All of those interfaces listed are (or have) standard block device interfaces. Except for USB anything that works with them will connect up to standard hardware drivers that ship with windows. And in the case of USB, if it emulates a standard block storage device then you don't need drivers for that either.

Past that, the file formatting on the ZIP drives was probably FAT32. There would be no advantage to IOMega inventing their own file format.

So yeah, hook it up, 99% chance it'll show up as a standard 100 meg disk drive (or whatever size you have)

Went right ahead and plugged it in, Windows 7 recognized the drive, however it insists the disk be reformatted, which I believe will erase the contents of the disk, correct? Is there a way to work around this, to save the files?

Thanks for your help.

If it says that my guess would be that the drive is not reading the disks and is reporting to windows that they are unformatted.

That /may/ not be the actual case, but is proabably the most likely explaination.

I recently went through my boxes of 5.25 in disks and read them all onto folders on my server just to save them for posterity. 99% of them read fine but there were a few that had simply died in the long storage and were no longer readable. This was on an XP machine and I don't rememebr the exact error but it was something similar...

The only way to know for sure may be to do a temp XP install on a spare HD and install the old IOMega drivers and tools and use those to inspect the disks. (Mught be able to do this through VMWare if the drive is USB based)

Like fseal says at the end of his post you may be able to do this using XP Virtual Machine Mode IF you have Professional or Ultimate version of Windows 7 if you have either of those it can be downloaded here Download Windows XP Mode