29 Dec 2016
As described in the previous post, I’m using SCSI IOmega ZIP (Z100S) drive as a mass storage for my Macintosh Plus. I prepared zip floppies with a few versions of the Macintosh System installed - if you’re into retro computing it’s fun to compare the performance and the features between different OSes.
I dumped the zip floppies into disk images, so they can be easily restored. All you need is an USB zip drive (Z100U) connected to your modern computer (Macbook Pro in my case). Images can be downloaded below:
Besides from the system, images contain a fair amount of abandonware tools and games (MacWrite, MacPaint, MS Excel & Word, StuffIt, ZTerm, Civilization, Lemmings, etc.)
If you use OS X / Linux, the images can be written to the zip floppies using the dd command:
Manufacturer: IOMega: Type: Disks and drive: Capacity: 100MB, 250MB To run ZIP drive, you must have ZIP Tools or ZIP Guest driver. IOMega released drivers in packages, so usually ZIP 250 driver package contain older driver for 100, and it may contain even drivers for IDE, ATAPI or parallel port drives. Introducing the new 100MB External USB Zip(r) drive from Iomega - for Power Macs with a built-in USB connection and PC systems with a built-in USB controller running Windows 98! The new, sleek translucent ice-blue 100MB External USB Zip drive is simple to connect, hot swappable, and compatible with over 100 million 100MB Zip disks. EDIT: Nothwistanding the above, the floppy install disk contains the Iomega Driver and Iomega Guest which are actually sufficient to use the Zip Drive. Compatibility Architecture: 68k. Mrdav: The Iomega Driver and Guest work with Mac OS 6.0.8 and Mac OS 7, whereas the Zip Tools need Mac OS 7 (adapted from the installation guide). JaZip is a FREE program for maintaing your Iomega Zip and/or Jaz drive(s) and disks under Linux. This program combines Grant Guenther's original command line utility, ziptool, with Jaz drive support, a nice X interface and additional utilities to allow users to easily mount and unmount disks. The interface is.
where /dev/diskX is the appropriate device. On the OS X it’s a good idea to disable the automount feature, as the OS may corrupt the old HFS filesystem once it’s written. The Disk Arbitrator can be used for this purpose.
The images can be also used with emulators (like vMac). It’s only required to extract the HFS filesystem (as the image also contains the IOmega drive, partition table which confuses the emulator):
The resulting system608-hfs.image is an emulator-bootable image:
Basilisk II support using the disk images directly, but it’ll only work with System 7.5.5.
I also prepared the same images in the native MacOS format (.hqx + DiskCopy 6):
Update (February 2020)
People on the internet noticed that the images are infected by the nVIR virus. I’m sorry for that, I must have got it with some vintage archives when I’ve been compiling these images. I’ve used Disinfectant to remove the virus and I’ve rebuilt all the files (.image.gz and .img.hqx).
Also, there’s a very interesting blog post about preparing disk images on modern environment: Setting up your vintage (classic) 68k Macintosh: using a 100MB SCSI Iomega Zip Drive.
Iomega Zip Driver Mac
Related Posts