I recently had the interesting task of getting some interesting data off a 100 MB Zip disk for my Media Station project. Yes, that Zip. The Click of Death kind.

Someone gave me lovely Tangent tower for free the other day - that’s another topic - and there was a Zip drive in it. It was manufactured in 2000. I just hoped there weren’t many hours on it. I didn’t have a spare disk to check if the drive was good - I probably should have gotten one to test with.

After carefully inspecting the disk to try to ensure the surface wasn’t torn, I put the disk into the drive and started up Windows 98. The disk seemed to load okay, but I got the dreaded “This disk needs to be formatted” error. However, I had good reason to suspect this was a Mac disk. So, the age old question, how to image a Mac disk on Windows 98?

If I’d had an ATAPI-to-USB adapter, connecting the Zip drive to my modern system would have been easy. But I only have a plain IDE adapter. So, I tried some other things instead:

  • WinImage 6.0. Crashed on clicking “Read Disk”. I suspect this function was only designed for reading floppies and didn’t know what to do with a 100 MB disk 🙃
  • WinImage 8.0. The drive made a funny “scrubbing” sound that sure sounded like head bashing to me. It didn’t sound like examples of the Click of Death that I listened to online, but I was still really worried that the disk and or/drive were toast.
  • Norton Ghost 2003. The Zip drive didn’t even show up when booting from the Ghost CD-ROM :(

I’d spent two hours on this and was really mad. So I pulled out a CD-R and did what I probably should have done in the first place - burned an ancient Linux distro from 2005. That seemed like a good fit for my 500 MHz, 384 MB RAM system. Thankfully, it was recent enough to enable booting from CDs in the first place.

This old distro didn’t have ddrescue, but thankfully good ol’ dd did the trick. I was dealing with an ancient version of dd that didn’t have status=progress. So my trusty AI friends recommended using the USR1 signal, which I didn’t know about.

The imaging completed fairly quickly with no apparent errors, so I copied the image to the the CompactFlash disk in the tower, then to my modern machine. A quick inspection in the hex editor revealed this was in fact an HFS disk!

So it just needed to be mounted in SheepShaver. Unfortunately, the contents were pretty boring - no engine source code. But the process was interesting!

What have your experiences been with ZIP disks? Ever experienced data loss due to the dreaded Click of Death?