Sunday, June 04, 2006

the reluctant mac daddy

I’ve been trying to keep from setting up my old Macintosh to recapture some old files I had on it, but it looks more and more like I’m going to have to.

My latest epiphany happened this afternoon when I decided to pull out the old 110MB SCSI Zip drive I have, because most of the Mac's files were backed up on Zip disks.

When I bought it back in 1998, the packaging claimed it could work for either Mac or Windows, but I never hooked up to a PC before a couple hours ago.

Of course, Windows 95 and Windows XP don’t tend to be terribly compatible, so you can surmise that the original (and quite ancient) software and drivers did not work. I figured a quick trip to Iomega’s website could fix this.

Wrong. After spending the better part of an hour downloading the updated software, I found out there was a hardware problem that required me open the CPU to somehow reset the SCSI card.

That’s where I stopped. I think it is possible to get this thing to work, but the instructions I got aren’t clear and I don’t want to mess up my computer. It’d be cheaper to track down a USB Zip drive that to send in the computer for service and replace the card if I broke it.

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