[ale] New Toy: Old Zip Drive

[Byron A Jeff]

On Thu, Feb 19, 2004 at 09:24:06AM -0500, John Mills wrote:
> ALErs -
> 
> A friend gave me one of the old-style, parallel-port external Zip100 
> drives which may actually be handy for me.
> 
> I want to use in on a Slackware-9.1 laptop. Entering:
>  "# insmod parport; insmod ppa" is rewarded with a little buzz of life
> from the drive (good news, I assume). What '/dev' file should I mount to
> find out if I can find any data on a disk? ("/dev/<something>4" I expect,
> if it's like other Zips I've used?)

/dev/sda4 most likely. It emulates a SCSI interface.

> 
> Also, the mini-howto mentions a conflict with the 'lp' module and 
> specifies the 'ppa' module be loaded first. 'lsmod' doesn't list 'lp' as 
> loaded. Is this something I need to worry about, and if so, how do I give 
> 'ppa' an earlier load than [say] adding it to 'rc.local'?

Old news. In 2.4 and 2.6 the parport module handles the multiplexing. So no
need to worry about it.

> 
> Thanks to the antique collectors for any help here.

BAJ (who actually sowed the kernel of the idea to get parallel port ZIP drive
support going in Linux nearly 10 years ago.)