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USB Zip drive problems and question about external hard drives.

Impreza

Impreza

macrumors member
Original poster
Mar 17, 2003
31
0
California
I have a problem with my zip drive and I was wondering if you guys can help me out. My zip drive was working perfectly fine on my Mac since I bought it. I just bought a new PC laptop. Out of curiosity, I plugged the USB zip drive to my laptop. Well, it works great with my laptop. Now I brought it back to my Mac. It either can't detect a disk in there and it isn't able to write on the disks. I had to restart in order for the zip drive to detect anything. All I could do was drag FROM the zip disk to the Mac, but I can't write or copy ONTO the zip drive. It just gives me an error (-36) and says I didn't properly unplug the device by "ejecting" it. I didn't even unplug anything! I plug it back into my laptop to make sure the device isn't busted and sure enough, the drive functions perfectly fine under XP. This sucks. Any advice is appreciated. I've been using zips for years for school work (I go to an art school and they use zips a lot) and I've transferred files from PC to Mac and vice versa all the time. I'm running OS X 10.2.6 on the dual G4 and Windows XP on my laptop. I'm seriously considering a USB pen drive now. A classmate of mine has one and it functions really well from PC to Mac and vice versa. =/

As for the external hard drive question. I've been thinking about getting a firewire/USB hard drive just for data storage for both my PC laptop and the Mac (for videos, MP3's, etc). I was wondering if I'll have any formatting problems or will both machines just read it as an external storage device? I'd hate to dump $150 on one and it only works well with one machine.
 
As for the zip drive it sounds defective to me. It shoudl work fine on both. The zip disk should be PC formated, then the PC and Mac can read it. As for Hard Drives listen to me. Get a FireWire drive, when dealing with big graphics and huge files you need speed, FireWire leaves USB 1.0 in the dust. When you get the hard drive it should be in PC format. Leave it that way! This way the dumb PC can read it and the Mac can to. Unfortunetly PC's can't read Mac drives out of the box, thier may be software but I don't know. Macs tend to write to PC formated disks a bit slower, well at least on my USB Zip drive this happened. So I dunno...You can also find say an 80 or 100GB HD and put it in a case yourself since FireWire case drives can tend to be expensive, hope I helped.

Anymore questions? :D
 
The thing is, I'm getting a combo firewire/USB 2.0 drive. My laptop has USB 2.0, which is pretty fast anyway, plus the firewire compatibility works well for my Mac (USB 1.0 is painfully slow for a hard drive haha). Thanks for the advice, I was worried about that and I just needed reassurance that the PC format can be read on a Mac since the Mac OS is pretty smart with that sort of thing.

Does anyone know if the new (gen. 3) iPods can be used as hard drives on both Macs and PC's too? Cuz I'm thinking about getting one of those as well just to store homework assignments for class if the USB pen drive thing is a little too small and I'd be afraid to lose it. Plus I've been wanting an MP3 player for a quite a while and my minidisc player isn't cutting it after trying to fit my daily rotation of music along with it's song titles. It can only write so much as far as track info before it just numbers them. :p

Anyway, thanks for your help guys, I just wanna get more of a heads up on storage devices for Macs cuz I'm kinda stuck without a zip drive and I don't wanna burn CD's all day for my next class.
 
I wouldn't recomend using an iPod on the hard drive because it put a lot of strain on it. I herd that it can kill your iPod. I wouldn't want that to happen to you. :p Well I don't even know if they are compatible with Mac and PC, although I think they are since there winst a Mac or PC version, there is just one.

Hope this helps, do a search for iPod and hard drive or something in this forum, you'll find more info.

-limey
 
fwiw, from my understanding the ipod can be configured to win or mac, but once its formatted the only way to undo it is to reformat to the new os, and thus wouldnt be useable for file transfers.
if i am wrong, feel free to hit me with a wet noodle.
--carly
 
Re: USB Zip drive problems and question about external hard drives.

Originally posted by Impreza
I have a problem with my zip drive and I was wondering if you guys can help me out. My zip drive was working perfectly fine on my Mac since I bought it. I just bought a new PC laptop. Out of curiosity, I plugged the USB zip drive to my laptop. Well, it works great with my laptop. Now I brought it back to my Mac. It either can't detect a disk in there and it isn't able to write on the disks. I had to restart in order for the zip drive to detect anything. All I could do was drag FROM the zip disk to the Mac, but I can't write or copy ONTO the zip drive. It just gives me an error (-36) and says I didn't properly unplug the device by "ejecting" it. I didn't even unplug anything! I plug it back into my laptop to make sure the device isn't busted and sure enough, the drive functions perfectly fine under XP. This sucks. Any advice is appreciated. I've been using zips for years for school work (I go to an art school and they use zips a lot) and I've transferred files from PC to Mac and vice versa all the time. I'm running OS X 10.2.6 on the dual G4 and Windows XP on my laptop. I'm seriously considering a USB pen drive now. A classmate of mine has one and it functions really well from PC to Mac and vice versa. =/

As for the external hard drive question. I've been thinking about getting a firewire/USB hard drive just for data storage for both my PC laptop and the Mac (for videos, MP3's, etc). I was wondering if I'll have any formatting problems or will both machines just read it as an external storage device? I'd hate to dump $150 on one and it only works well with one machine.
Click to expand...

Umm, no it's not defective.
I know what you did. You didn't use "safely remove hardware" program on pc when your zip was plugged into usb 2.0. Then you plugged it in a different USB port (not the one it was in b4) and BOOM you got this problem hehe.
I had similar problem with my 750 zip and compaq laptop. You always when using windows xp have to use that little icon in the tray b4 you unplug it "SAFELY REMOVE HARDWARE". For some reason, with zip drive if you just unplug it from 2.0 USB, it doesn't remove it from device manager list. and it keeps thinking that are pluggin in a duplicate device. Even if you remove that from device manager list, next time you restart computer, it still does the same thing. SO the only thing you can do at this point is to reinstall operating system. IT will fix it until the next time you screw up.
Macs can have similar problems with USB vserions of the drive.
It's not Operating system fault but crappy engineering of Iomega.

Just reinstall the system, it will work after.
 
Re: Re: USB Zip drive problems and question about external hard drives.

Originally posted by Rezet
...the only thing you can do at this point is to reinstall operating system....
...Just reinstall the system, it will work after.
Click to expand...

That is why I hate windows...:D
 
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