Problem with removable drive

[Capt Whatever]

A friend of mine is having problem with his zip drive when he connects it to his machine.
It actually detects his zip drive but he can't access it.
His running Windows 95 on his machine and when I looked in device manager
it has the yellow exclamation mark under "Hard Disk Controller".

Any ideas how to fix this anyone?

My suggestion was upgrade to Windows XP.

[fyrewall]

win 95 hey ... have you tried installing the driver that came with the zip drive .. I think win95 would be to old to install it itself ......

Upgrading to at least win98 would be a great move heh

Also I dont think win95 will detect it as a removable drive... you will have to tell it that its removable.

[©opy®ight]

I may be stabbing in the dark here, don't you have to connect the zip to the hard drive ? not sure !

[fyrewall]

nah you dont have to connect it to the hard drive .. it plugs in the back of the comp like any other peripheral device .. just curious tho .. where abouts in the hdd would you plug it in? heh

[Capt Whatever]

Thank you guys for the help, we actually evetually figured it out after playing around with it for awhile. Fyrewall you were right Win 95 doesn't recognise the zip drive as a removable drive.

So we ended up going to the system.ini file and just added the line:

REMOVABLEIDE=TRUE

It seems to be working anyway.
Thanks for the help. Still trying to convince my friend to upgrade his operating system.

[nihil]

Hi there Capt. Sensible or Whatever

My suggestion was upgrade to Windows XP.

Whilst I think that you are right in recommending an OS upgrade you need to be a bit careful here. If it is a Win95 box, it is obviously rather old, and may not be up for such a "quantum leap"

Can you post his machine specs, and I could probably advise you better.

For example, For XP you need a 233MHz processor and 128Mb of RAM, and that is about the minimum for full functionality. OK you may get it to work with less, but it will not be fully functional. I would personally look for a PIII/733 with at least 256Mb of RAM (384, or 512 would be preferable)

Fyrewall was spot on when he said:

Upgrading to at least win98 would be a great move heh

Win98 is the best of the Windows home OSes...............try for second edition. DO NOT go to Win ME Unless you like a challenge...................It runs just fine on Duron 1.3/512Mb, PII/333/384Mb and PII/450/384Mb, but lesser specs and it is "twitchy"

I have Win98SE running on a Digital Venturis 5133.............errr that's a PI/133MHz with 320Mb of RAM. It will benchmark to within 15% of a PII/266 and 128MB running ME and is as stable as you like!

Otherwise, I would look at Win2000, which is also far less resource demanding, than XP.

just a few thoughts

[Capt Whatever]

You're probably right, Windows XP might be a little bit too much for him

His only got a Celeron 700 with 64 MB of RAM.

Maybe a complete upgrade of his machine would also help I guess.

[SirDice]

He could install XP on that. But i'd recommend getting atleast 256MB before trying...

My 'old' P2-350 320MB machine ran XP fine...it even felt smoother then the win98 that was on it.