Re: ZIP Drives

[Al Hudson <nospam [at] york.ac.uk>]

On Sun, 7 Nov 1999, Craig Andrews wrote:

> has anybody got a parallel ZIP drive to work along with their printer
> under Linux?

Yes, one of my friends got it working. The solution was to buy another
parallel port :(.

Having said that, using pass-thru is fine if you're not intending on using
both devices at the same time.. you'll need to do some device driver
swapping to get that to work, although I'm told it does.

> I have kernel 2.2.10, so my system is up to date, and I
> have no spare IDE channels for in internal drive. (I also have no spare
> interface slots for a SCSI adapter).

I think the problem is that the parallel port is designed to be
single-peripheral only, and it's not a wise idea to have more than one
device dangling off it at a time. It's not just software, I suspect the
hardware specification would not allow for more than one device.

> If anyone has has any luck, let me know, as I need some way of storing
> all my stuff. If something bad happens, I could quite easily lose almost
> a gig of stuff, so I need something quick!

As I said, you can use them independently of each other. You'd have to (as
root) rmmod lp, then insmod imm to go from printer to zip drive. I've been
told this works, although I've never done it myself: I don't have a
printer ;)

Cheers,

Alex.

Start your own FREE mailing list at

© 2000 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved