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To: pabianice
Buy a 256 mb jump drive. Fits in your pocket. No drivers. Plug it into the old machine's USB, and fill it up with the data on the zip.

Walk over to the old machine and drag it into the new machine. Repeat the process for every zip in your stack.

If the new machine has a cdrw or better a cd/dvdrw then you can back it up there.

After that, thank your lucky stars that you didn't wait any longer..

When the last zip drive finally finds it's way into the trash bin, we'll all be way ahead.

18 posted on 12/03/2003 11:17:10 AM PST by Trailer Trash (Force equals mass times acceleration.)
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To: Trailer Trash
Yup. I bought an external USB hard drive kit, then went and got a cheap laptop size 10 gigger. I never burn CD's anymore, (except for muzak), if I have something I want to back up, I copy it off the laptop to the external HD, then copy it to one of my desktops.
26 posted on 12/03/2003 11:26:22 AM PST by djf
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To: Trailer Trash
When the last zip drive finally finds it's way into the trash bin, we'll all be way ahead.

You got that right, TT.
About two months after I had first heard of ZIP drives I had the opportunity to install two of them.
Both were bad right out of the box!

Ever hear the phrase, "click death"? That's the term for what befalls a zip drive; it just continually clicks, trying to recognize the disk.

I soon found myself replacing these drives frequently, as I worked as a break-fix technician for a university. I even took a few of then apart to see if I could determine the cause of "click death". Much to my surprise, the transport (the mechanism that handles the disk within the drive) was made completely of plastic! Contrast that to a floppy drive; floppy drive transports are made out of metal.

I did find out that "click death" is caused by the read/write heads suffering some kind of damage from, say, inserting a ZIP disk into the drive. The heads then continually move back and forth across the disk surface trying to find the first cluster or file block, but they are damaged and cannot read from the disk. This may also, then, damage the disk surface so that any data on the disk is lost.
Based upon personal experience, I would recommend another storage medium.

30 posted on 12/03/2003 11:37:03 AM PST by Ignatz (Helping people be more like me since 1960)
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