Re: Use Iomega Zip or Bernoulli on Apple //e?

[dempson@actrix.gen.nz (David Empson)]

Michael W. Hulsey <huv@ornl.gov> wrote:

> Is this possible?

It certainly should be.  I haven't tried my ZIP drive on a IIe, but it
works on my IIgs with an Apple High-Speed SCSI card.  (It normally lives
on my PowerMac.)

> I have Iomega Zip and Bernoulli 150Mb drives and would like to be able
> transfer files from the //e to my Mac using one of these drives.

That will be tricky.  With the standard Iomega driver (for the Mac), the
Mac doesn't like ProDOS-formatted ZIPs.  The //e cannot write to
HFS-formatted ones, so your options are rather limited.

It might be possible to use a third-party driver for the Mac which
recognises ProDOS partitions.  This would allow you to partition a ZIP
disk on the Apple II and use ProDOS format to transfer files to the Mac.

It would probably be necessary to disable the standard Iomega driver
when doing this.

I don't know whether the Bernoulli would work, but it should operate on
the same principle (assuming it appears to be a SCSI hard drive).

> I know I would have to get an Apple ][ SCSI card, but would this still
> work (need a driver, etc.).

The ZIP drive is treated as a removable hard drive, which is
sufficiently supported by the Apple High-Speed SCSI card firmware.

You would have to be careful with the original Apple SCSI card, which
doesn't know about removable hard drives.  If you eject the ZIP disk and
insert another one, the SCSI card will not re-read the partition table,
so it will misinterpret data on the new disk (and can destroy its
contents if you attempt to write to the disk).  You must reboot to
recognise the new cartridge correctly.

> If this does work, could I do this for regular DOS (even if I have to
> convert them to image files) and Pro-DOS disks?

The ZIP disk is treated as a hard drive by ProDOS, so you can just copy
files from a ProDOS floppy to the ZIP (provided the ZIP has been
partitioned correctly with ProDOS partitions).  If you want to copy disk
images, you would need a disk image creation program.

Given Chinook SCSI Utilities (which I posted to comp.binaries.apple2 a
few weeks back), you can partition a ZIP cartridge with three 32MB
partitions (or more partitions of smaller sizes).  This would have to be
done carefully to preserve the Macintosh driver.

The SCSI card is not supported by DOS 3.3.  One option would be to
create disk images of any DOS 3.3 disks and copy the disk image to the
ZIP disk.  Another possibility would be to convert the files to ProDOS
(using CONVERT, System Utilities, Copy II+ or Chameleon) and copy them
individually to the ZIP, but this is likely to be of limited use.

-- 
David Empson
dempson@actrix.gen.nz
Snail Mail: P.O. Box 27-103, Wellington, New Zealand