Removable Storage Devices
The IOmega Zip drive was and still is one of the most indispensible peripherals ever invented for the personal computer. It allows us to transport, store, and backup hundreds of megabytes of data to and from our hard drives as cost efficiently as possible. Sure, the standard 1.44MB floppy is still cheap medium for file transport, but the original Zip drive allows 100MB at a time to be transported, and in the same physical space as three standard floppy diskettes.
IOmega has produced a line of these drives, in both internal and external models, and with capacities ranging from 40MB (Clik) to 2GB (Jaz) models.
The good news is that OS/2 is able to work with some of these models. To use these devices under OS/2 requires a device driver be installed. From what I have seen on the Web, there are OS/2 drivers available for the following:
Note: The USB models are supported by OS/2 Warp 4 and Aurora only by first downloading the Base USB Support driver from IBM's Device Driver Pak OnLine site, and then downloading the correct driver for the USB device.
Note: The original external IOmega Zip drive and Jaz drives operate off a standard ECP/EPP parallel port. However, the Zip Plus, Zip 250 and Jaz 2GB drives are accessed differently from the original Zip/Jaz models, and therefore require a different parallel port driver from the one available from IOmega's website (which is also available at the Hobbes Virtual Archive). Apparently, IOmega is no longer supporting OS/2 for these parallel port drives as there has not been a new version of its OS/2 driver.
So keep this in mind when selecting a removable storage device for your OS/2 system.
These instructions are for parallel port and internal port models only. The USB drivers are installed the same way as for other USB devices under OS/2.
In OS/2, you will need to unpack the archive into an empty directory (or a floppy as the driver will fit on a diskette) and install the driver using the Install Device Driver utility found in the System Setup folder.
After installing and rebooting OS/2, you will get a message stating that the driver installation is incomplete.
You will need to open a Full Screen OS/2 session, and type in the following:
to configure the OAD, or Open Architecture Device, driver for your storage device. You will get a screen load of help from the utility. Please read through this information, and press Escape when you are finished.
Then from the main menu, select Scan Physical Connections so the utility will be able to find your storage device and adapter where it is connected. Make sure the devices are connected and powered up before running the utility.
Once the devices are found, press Esc to leave the menu. You will be prompted to save changes to the
Once you leave the utility, exit out of the Full Screen OS/2 session (by typing
When your system starts, your Zip/Jaz drive is assigned a drive letter, and is accessed like any other drive in your OS/2 system. There is one caveat for use of these drives. They must be turned on and there must be a disk in the drive at system startup time, or you will get a
There are two ways of looking at these devices, either as a large capacity floppy drive, or as a secondary hard drive.
The FAT system is not efficient for today's storage devices, but has the advantage of being able to be transported without having to mount the disk in the drive after inserting the physical disk in the drive.
If you wish to exchange Zip and/or Jaz disks with other systems equipped with these drives, you will need to have disks formatted with the FAT file system. Fortunately, the disks available off-the-shelf are formatted as such, and therefore require no extra formatting procedures on your part to use the disks. Simply insert the disk in the drive, and you are ready to go.
If you wish to use the HPFS file system with these drives, you will first need to lock the disk in the drive. To do that, open the Drives folder, which is in the OS/2 System folder, and then right-click on the drive icon where the device is assigned, and then select Lock Disk. The icon should change to a hard drive icon, indicating that the device is now a fixed disk.
Here is the catch. If you insert a HPFS formatted disk into a Zip/Jaz drive and then access the drive, the drive will automatically lock itself. To unlock the disk when there is a HPFS disk in the drive, you will need to shut down OS/2 first and reboot the system. This is very important as HPFS buffers its I/O in memory. These buffers need to be flushed before the system can shut down.
Therefore, If you insert a HPFS formatted disk in the drive at startup time, the drive will automatically lock since OS/2 probes the drive at boot time. To prevent this, insert a FAT formatted disk in the drive, even if it is blank.
If you remove the HPFS disk without shutting down OS/2 first, you will corrupt the data on that disk, and you will then have to reformat that disk. So to exchange disks, you will need to completely shut down OS/2 first, then eject the HPFS disk, and then insert another disk in the drive, before restarting OS/2. If you wish to exchange data with other users, you must use the FAT system with the Zip/Jaz disks.
OS/2 stores extended attributes on every FAT disk in your system. This includes standard floppies as well as Zip/Jaz disks, and FAT partitions. This allows long filenames to be used with OS/2. However, this method is not compatible with the Windows method of long filename storage on diskettes.
So to exchange data between your OS/2 and Windows systems, you will need to restrict your filenames to the 8.3 restriction guidelines established with the FAT system. OS/2 is not currently able to read FAT32 formatted disks, though there might be an OS/2 IFS available for FAT32 by the time you read this.
Windows stores its long filenames by assigning an 8.3 filename in this format:
IOmega Drive
OS/2 Drivers Available
IOmega Zip 100 (parallel port model)
OS/2 Version 2.x, 3, 4
IOmega Zip 100 (SCSI external model)
OS/2 Version 2.x, 3, 4
IOmega Zip 100 (internal ATAPI model)
OS/2 Version 2.x, 3, 4
IOmega Zip 100 (external USB model)
OS/2 Version 4 only
(see note below table)
IOmega Zip 250 (parallel port model)
not available
IOmega Zip Plus (parallel port model)
not available
IOmega Jaz 1GB (SCSI external model)
OS/2 Version 2.x, 3, 4
IOmega Jaz 1GB (SCSI internal model)
OS/2 Version 2.x, 3, 4
IOmega Jaz 2GB (SCSI external model)
not available
IOmega Jaz 2GB (SCSI internal model)
not available
IOmega Clik (PCAMIA external model)
not available
Installing and configuring the Zip/Jaz device drivers
cd oad
genoad
GENOAD file. Select Yes to save the changes. This is very important or your device will not work when you restart your machine. Then tell the utility to overwrite the existing file.
exit at the prompt), and restart your OS/2 system for the changes to take effect. This is very important as the configuration file for the storage device driver is read only at system startup time.
Using your Zip/Jaz drive in OS/2
SYS0045 message at boot time stating that the removable drive is not ready.
Data Exchange with Windows 95/98 Systems
XXXXXX~#.EEE
where XXXXXX is the first six characters of the filename being stored in the FAT directory, # is a number (or letter) assigned by Windows to distinguish names that begin with the first six letters of the long filename, and EEE is the first three characters of the file extension.
The rest of the filename is stored by Windows in the FAT directory entry for that file. If OS/2 overwrites the file with that name, the long filename is retained. However, if OS/2 removes that file and replaces it with another file, the long filename is removed with the original file.
In addition, OS/2 places two hidden files on your disk, named EA SF and WP ROOT SF. These files are used to store the extended attributes of the files on the disk.
The
Sometimes it becomes necessary to reformat Zip/Jaz disks. IOmega provides a set of tools with the driver archive.
If you need to reformat a Zip/Jaz disk, you will need to open a Full Screen OS/2 session and run the MPREP utility, which is in the OAD directory. There are two options with this utility: The physical format, and the verification. To format a Zip/Jaz disk, you will need to have the physical format setting set to Yes. The verification does a scan for physical defects on the disk, and is performed before the disk is formatted, if the verification option is set to Yes.
By default, verification is set to No since the process takes several (about ten) minutes for a Zip disk. Use this if you suspect a Zip or Jaz disk contains defects.
Once the disk is formatted using the MPREP utility, it must then be formatted with the OS/2 or DOS FORMAT utility, or with the Format Disk command from the popup menu on the icon assigned to the Zip/Jaz drive.
If you use the Zip/Jaz drive as a secondary hard disk, you can store and run applications directly off the disk as if it were another drive.
If you swap disks and you have assigned icons on the Workplace Shell to files on the disk, make sure that disk is in the Zip/Jaz drive at the time you start OS/2, or you will lose the program icons for that OS/2 session.
One workaround to this problem is to create one folder on the Workplace Shell desktop for each Zip disk that you have applications installed. Then to access these icons, simply insert the appropriate disk in the Zip/Jaz drive and open the associated folder.
mtools package has been ported to OS/2, and you can use those to exchange data between your OS/2 and Windows systems.
Reformatting Zip/Jaz Disks
The Workplace Shell and Zip/Jaz Disks
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