Datasheet

14 Chapter 1
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Hardware
While not as common as they once were, Iomega’s Zip and Jaz drives
are detachable, external hard disks that are used to store a large volume
(around 100MB for the Zip, 1GB and 2GB for the Jaz) of data on a single,
thick floppy-sized disk. The drives connect to either a parallel port or a
special interface card. The major use of Zip and Jaz drives is to transport
large amounts of data from place to place. This used to be accomplished
with several floppies.
HOT SWAPPABLES
The term “hot swappable” is used to refer to any media that can be changed without the
system being brought down. In RAID arrays (discussed later in this chapter), if a failed
hard drive can be replaced with a new hard drive without needing to bring the system
down, then it is said to be hot swappable.
Floppy and Other Removable Disk Drive Problems
Most floppy drive problems result from bad media. Your first troubleshooting technique
with floppy drive issues should be to try a new disk.
One of the most common problems that develops with floppy drives is misaligned read/
write heads. The symptoms are fairly easy to recognize—you can read and write to a floppy
on one machine but not on any others. This is normally caused by the mechanical arm in
the floppy drive becoming misaligned. When the disk was formatted, it wasn’t properly
positioned on the drive, thus preventing other floppy drives from reading it.
Numerous commercial tools are available to realign floppy drive read/write heads. They
use a floppy drive that has been preformatted to reposition the mechanical arm. In most
cases, though, this fix is temporary—the arm will move out of place again fairly soon. Given
the inexpensive nature of the problem, the best solution is to spend a few dollars and replace
the drive or upgrade and get rid of it altogether.
Another problem you may encounter is a phantom directory listing. For example, suppose
you display the contents of a floppy disk, and then you swap to another floppy disk but the
listing stays the same. This is almost always a result of a faulty ribbon cable; a particular wire
in the ribbon cable signals when a disk swap has taken place, and when that wire breaks, this
error occurs.
CD-ROM/DVD/Blu-ray Issues
CD-ROM, DVD, and Blu-ray problems are normally media-related. Although compact
disc technology is much more reliable than floppy disks, it’s not perfect. Another factor to
consider is the cleanliness of the disc. On many occasions, if a disc is unreadable cleaning
it with an approved cleaner and a lint-free cleaning towel will fix the problem.
If the operating system doesn’t see the drive, start troubleshooting by determining
whether the drive is receiving power. If the tray will eject, you can assume there is power to
it. Next, check BIOS Setup (for IDE drives) to make sure the drive has been detected. If not,
check the master/slave jumper on the drive, and make sure the IDE adapter is set to Auto,
CD-ROM, or ATAPI in BIOS Setup.
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