The case of the disappearing drive

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I have a question regarding my disappearing Zip drive (I’m also going to check out the Iomega site, but I thought I’d also check with the extremely helpful Lounge folk). The drive is an external Zip 100, which I use to back up documents that I have to tote between my home and office computer. At least a half a dozen times in as many months, the drive (D) disappears from my home computer (Win ME OS). Today, for example, I tried to save a document to the Zip disk, but the drive didn’t appear among my choices. Yesterday it was there, but nothing was changed on my system in the interim. What I have to do is uninstall the Iomega program and reinstall it (I’ve learned to keep the program in a Save file.) Once I do that, the drive is there and I can save my document. The whole process is irritating and time consuming.

Any ideas?

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Hmm…

Perhaps Power Management is disabling the connection between Zip Drive and System? I assume this is a USB connection, in which case, having advanced power management enabled might terminate the connection after a period of non-use. If it’s USB, it’s also most likely ‘hot swappable’ this means that you may be able to disconnect/reconnect the device while the system is running, prompting ME to re-evaluate the hardware associated with it.

I may be way off base here, but I hope it helps!

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Certainly something to think about, but I’m not sure if it explains the disappearance. Yes, it’s USB connected. However, between yesterday and today, Power Management didn’t come into play. When I’m going to be gone from my computer for some time, I manually instigate “sleep.” Otherwise, the Power Management doesn’t engage. The “hot swappable” could be a factor, except I leave the Zip drive connected. The only time I disconnect it is if I have to open the case and clean out the dust bunnies or replace a video card. That hasn’t been the situation when the drive letter vanished.

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APM may take place even with the system in ‘Sleep’. Sleep mode is a windows function that normally halts the hard-drive spin, and shuts off the monitor. This leaves the BIOS in control when it comes to Advanced Power Management.

Just for kicks, you might go in and disable this ‘feature’ of your BIOS. Hopefully it’ll fix the problem!

Another solution would be to check and see if an update to your drivers has been released for the Zip drive. This may be a driver problem too.

HTH.

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I understand what you say about APM, but as I indicated, I hadn’t used “sleep” or any other Power Management the last time the Zip drive disappeared. On previously occurrences, I frankly don’t remember. I guess my basic question is how APM would cause a drive designation to disappear.

Also, I have the latest drivers for the Zip model.

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DenGar,

I found your discussion very interesting since I have a Zip Drive (parallel port, however.) It would be interesting to see if the cabling makes any difference between low-speed and high speed, and I would assume you require high speed. Take a look at: Q263218 at the MS Knowledge Base. If your drive is related to the SCSI controller you might read Q316857. Good luck!

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I’ve found that Iomega has suggested fixes on the problem: http://www.iomega.com/support/documents/30012.html%5B/url%5D . What seems to apply in my situation is dedicating the USB only to the Zip drive. That’s a solution. I have other USB hardware that I use more often, a printer, for example. Plugging and unplugging hardware devices is hardly the way I want to spend my time–and my set up makes access to the USB ports a contortionist’s act (beautiful furniture but hardly practical in terms to accessibility to the back of the computer).

The other possible solution among the five offered is to manually assign the drive designation. Also a pain.

What puzzles me is that the Zip drive can function perfectly well for a month, but then decide to disappear. I suspect it also relates to Windows’ (Win ME, in particular) buggy nature.

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