Ok last night I installed an internal ZIP drive in my pc in place of the external one, but the problem was even with the newest drivers it wasnt recognized, that is it wasnt picked up as new hardware. So I tried a few things and asked a certain tech guru a few questions, but I think I have found the problem. Im pretty sure it needs to be set as a slave drive, as it is presentlty a master. But the thing is you need jumpers for this, and I dont seem to have any, So can you use anything for jumpers? Does anyone have any recommendations? Or do you have to just buy some.

Thanks
Ross

Hmm... a toughy indeed. I usualyl have spares everywhere. (ive gone through 3 mainboards, i usuay salvage all the 5 jumpers on them.)

HOWEVER! If its new from the shop, it should have a jumper. if not, then go down to your nearest puter shop and see if they can sell you a couple. its pretty cheap as long as their 'nice' puter peopple.

Otherwise try your friends, maybe they have spares. The reason why is that theirs no substitue for a jumper clip, unless you want to experiment with some copper wire, or aliminium, or maybe lead O_o... or maybe a rubber band? O_O (just kidding, none of those methods will be good, so your going to need the jumper)

Hope it works mate, or its my ass on the table LOL!

Marikai

lol, well I have 4 computers sitting here, but none of them have any spare ones. Which sucks. I suppose I could just go to a computer shop, although it will probably be a week, but no biggie, unless anyone else knows anything?

wait, several things first...

1) jumpers are cheap, like five cents a piece or something.

2) its probably not jumpers causing the problem.

3) is the drive on the same ISB Cable (the long thin cable with two pluggy things on it) as the hard drive? okay, now is the drive plugged into the plug on the end of the chord, or the plug in the middle of the chord? why is this important? well, if its set on master, and you have it plugged into the middle plug, it wont work, because that middle plug is for the slave drive. if you have it on a different ISB Cable than your hardrive, try switching its position on the ISB Cable (and temporarily leaving off other things from that cable). fire up the computer and see if it works.

5) leaving other devices unplugged, take a jumper from an unplugged CD Drive and use it to set the jumper settings (which can be found online on the specs sheet for your device) see if that works. set all your jumpers appropriately based on where they are on the ISB wire (end plug = master, middle plug = slave) and retry firing up the computer.

if that doesnt work, then its not the jumper. how old is your computer and when you bought the drive did it come with a cd? small companies drivers are often not included with windows. Also, does the drive work without installing the driver? have you tried just plugging something in to see how it goes? finally, and i know this sounds dumb but computer problems are sometimes simple: when you plugged in your drive, did you remember to plug in the power cord as well as the ISB Cable? If your drive isnt getting power the computer will not recognize it.

Hmmm... a couple of things.

First, not only does this drive have to be a slave, but the other one has to be a master. Make sure both are jumpered properly; there are usually some indicator marks near the jumper area.

Second, I've not added a ZIP drive, so I'm not familiar with the connections. However, on the various hard drives and CD-xxxx drives I've added, there's always been a spot to jumper them in the back, by the power cord. And conveniently, they have all shipped with a jumper connector! It's usually in an un-jumpered state, but it's been there.

Third, I know that IDE cables at one point did determine what was the master and slave on a particular connection, but I'm under the impression that that habit has gone by the wayside, and BIOS just uses the jumper settings. I could certainly be wrong, though, and there's nothing wrong with deciding to put the master on one connector and the slave on the other.

You might also try removing the other drive from the cable, just to make sure that the ZIP drive works.

Good luck.

nope, the jumper settings have to agree with the IDE cable reading (try reversing your hard drives sometime and see if it fires up, it'll tell you that the master settings are incorrect).

also, there is no position for the jumper to be in a "non jumpered" setting. The connection it ships in is generally the "auto detect" setting, which should allow you to plug it into any IDE cable position and have function... the thing that baffles me is the fact that it doesnt work with no jumper, because no jumper should also normally function as auto-detect.

computer is brand new, just adding a zip for convenience. I dont know if it works without the driver, but if you mean on the computer Im putting it in, then no, with or without the driver it wont work. yes, the power is plugged in and the light comes on when I put a disk in, so not that.

I did a little searching on Cable-Select setting, which is what lets the cable determine who's the master and who's the slave. I found a nice explanation here.

Basically, to make cable select work, you need a special kind of cable, and most commercial ones out there aren't that kind. So the odds of finding a Cable-select environment on a new PC are pretty slim.

I'll go back to making sure that both drives are jumpered properly -- one as a master, and the other as a slave. The default setting for a drive is not to be jumpered as a master, so if you haven't fixed that, it won't work.

Ermmm... you *do* have the IDE cable plugged into the back of it as well, right?

You could borrow a jumper from another drive, if one of the other drives (for example cd drive) defaults to cabel select without jumpers you could take the jumper off that and put it on the zip drive, or you could be fairly dodgey and ues some kind of fine wire as a temporary soloution, such as fuse wire, even if it did make a bad connection it should't cause any damage.
But i suggest just waiting and continuing to use your external drive for now and later buying some jumpers.

course I do! [img]smile.gif[/img]