unreadable zip-100 disk

[mnkyspnk5w]

I have Winhex 10.7 (a hex editor) and my friend recently ran into the problem that the zip drive no longer recognizes her disk (it's a zip-100 disk). I opened up Winhex and tried both the open disk and clone disk commands but windows does not believe there to be a disk in the drive at all. It gives me an error #10: An Error Occured While Accessing Drive I:.

Poking around through computer management, the disk is acknowledged as removable storage with unknown volume size and unknown volume label. This is also where it indicates that the volume is both unmounted and unallocated.

So I went into MS-DOS and tried a RECOVER command. It states that it cannot determine the file system on drive I:.

I acquired MS-DOS 6.2 from a friend. I created the three installation disks but it appears that MS-DOS 6.2 is a stand-alone OS and cannot be run from within Windows as it prompted me to format my primary disk. I was hoping that with MS-DOS 6.2 to run the DRVSPACE /INFO command or even attempt to remount the drive from within DOS.

Last thing I tried was booting from a Windows XP CD. In the past when a "directory tree" (I may be using the term incorrectly) has been corrupted and confused the partitioned and unpartitioned spaces, deleting the "directory tree" as if to install windows upon that partition (now, an unpartitioned space) and then aborting the remainder of the installation allowed me to get back to the raw hex data. The Windows XP installation indicated:

"There is no disk in the drive."

"There is no disk in the drive."
Space on disk 95MB.

"There is no disk in the drive."
Available space 114000MB.

Or something like that. So, the partitions are there...?

thanks in advance for any help

 

[GregANDTCH]

Why don't you use the Disk-Tools from Iomega on the disk?
Maybe the tools can tell you what's wrong with the disk.
I'm assuming that a different disk will still read in the drive.
It's not the "click-death" thing is it?

 

[mnkyspnk5w]

thanks for asking~

nope, it's not the click-death. i just read about that yesterday after encountering the problem.

as for iomega tools, i will certainly give that a try.

and yup, the drive still reads other disks just fine.

 

[huesmann]

Magnetic media does wear out, you know, or get corrupted.

 

[mnkyspnk5w]

yeah, thanks. she claims the disk has been unused though for the last three years and that she recently hasn't run it into anything that could de-magnitize it.

 

[mnkyspnk5w]

Iomega tools properly recognizes the disk as 100MB. The Disk Information Tab states:

Disk Type: Zip 100MB
Disk Life Status: OK (99%)
Format Life Status: OK (98%)
Format Type: Unknown Format
Manufacture Date: 00126

I'm also going to get me a copy of Norton Utilities and see if that's of any help-

 

[yelo333]

Originally posted by: mnkyspnk5w
Iomega tools properly recognizes the disk as 100MB. The Disk Information Tab states:

Disk Type: Zip 100MB
Disk Life Status: OK (99%)
Format Life Status: OK (98%)
Format Type: Unknown Format
Manufacture Date: 00126

I'm also going to get me a copy of Norton Utilities and see if that's of any help-

I suppose it's your money, and norton is a good program for general matenance, but all it has (that I can think of at least) for zip disks would be a generic scandisk, with the Norton logo...

 

[mnkyspnk5w]

yep, no luck with norton system works either. *bump* for help please.

 

[GregANDTCH]

Sorry I couldn't help more.
I was hoping the disk or format life might be "low" & would explain the problem.

Unknown Format

Could it be "password protected"?
Maybe that would hide the FAT for the disk.

 

[Zepper]

Sounds like it may need to be reformatted. Steve Gibson's site has some zip drive tools that may help you. Linkage .
..bh.