zip drive help

[skullsdontfade]

i have a compaq pc at my house and i use mac g4's at school. the only way to transfer files is through zips so i bought a external parallel zip drive for my home pc. i plugged it all up, installed transmac and everything was going smooth. it read the mac disks and wrote quickly. i've done this for about a week, but now when i insert my mac disks, the zip drive just clicks and never reads. is there a way to fix this?

also, i heard that pc zip disks could be read/written to on macs, any truth? that way i could just stop using mac zips and move onto the pc zips. thanks to anyone that can help, i'm quite fluent with windows based computers, but i've never gotten into macs, so i don't know much about them or their software/hardware.

 

[TEG]

Any PC disk (with few exceptions like NTFS formatted disks) will be read on Macs with no extra software needed.

Does the Zip Drive still read any disks. If not you may have had the "Click of Death." If it is new, call iomega and complain, if not, your most likely SOL.

TEG

 

[skullsdontfade]

i don't have any pc disks to try it on, but i got it off ebay for cheap..so no biggie i guess. we have one station at school with a cd-rw so i can just use that until i can get a new drive...this "click of death", i assume is a notorious problem?

 

[joeyjojoe]

i'm using a 256 mb flash drive which i find easier than zip. you may want to try that out if you can get a flash drive for cheap (and assuming USB is available on your compaq and you aren't using WinNT).

 

[skullsdontfade]

okay this is odd...i just put the mac disk in my drive and it clicked and clicked but eventually read.

and it just read another. i think it just hesitates on reading the disks and it's really hit or miss..i find that if i switch disks really fast it doesn't have an issue, clicks once and it's in. i might just try leaving one in their until i need to switch.

 

[TEG]

Unfortunately the click of death is such a big problem that there was a class action lawsuit about it.

Try making a PC disk. Put a blank Mac disk in, and use the iomega tools (available on their website if you don't have them) and format the disk PC. If you can do that, I'd just use the PC formatted disks.

TEG