🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <4cgml0$ijv@comet.magicnet.net>, johna@magicnet.net 
says...
>
>In article <4ceqj1$bef@shore.shore.net>, ay@warpsoft.com 
(Albert Yarusso) says:
>>
>>I just picked up a ZIP drive and although it'd be nice to have 
the
>>speed of the SCSI version, I couldn't even consider it because 
*none*
>>of the machines (at home and work) that I'll be using the 
drive with
>>have SCSI controllers.  I've found the performance of the ZIP 
drive to
>>be quite acceptable, especially if your BIOS supports the EPP 
parallel
>>port architecture.
>>
>I take it that you are mostly interested in the portability of 
the unit
>itself.  If you just want to tote the media between work and 
home, I
>recommend the IDE version of the EZ 135.  It is fast 
(1.7MBytes/Sec) on
>an EIDE controller (CORETEST.EXE) and cheap ($170 w/o disk) the 
disks are
>$20 each and hold 127MB.  Of course you need to buy a unit for 
each machine.
>I have two external EZ scsi units and an IDE EZ and I think 
they're great.
>I'm more interested in speed because I work right off the 
drive. I also back
>up to the server every day, but I haven't had a failure yet.
>
>John Anderson



I ditto (No pun intended, sorry IOmega!) Mr. Anderson's 
kudos. After deciding on the need for high capacity removable 
storage, I waged this same debate in my mind. I decided to go 
with the EZ135 IDE for its speed. I replaced my 2nd Hard Drive 
with it and was so happy that I recently switched it over to 
being my Master Drive. I'm now booting off it. It behaves 
just like another Hard Drive. The advantage being that I can now 
run different configations with a simple cartridge change. I can 
now run perfectly optimized setups of WFW 3.11, Win95 and DOS 
with no trade offs. Doom with Maximum XMS and every add-in I've 
got with megabytes to spare on one cartridge. Lotus 123 DOS with 
all my flight sims booting up into maximum EMS on another 
cartidge. It seems like I've got 5 different computers now. I'm 
thinking of playing around with Unix soon. Glory be! I can 
isolate the whole thing on one bootable cartidge. If I had gone 
with the Zip, I don't think I could do what I'm doing now with 
the same performance. As for durability, I realize that inside 
a EZ cartidge is a Hard Disk platter and I don't chuck it 
around like a floppy. An added bonus is that my GSI IDE 
controller card has built in support for Syquest drives.

Now a plea for help!
I've lost the ability to boot from a floppy. When I try, it gets 
to as far as "Starting MS DOS" then the system locks up with the 
floppy drive light still on. I have tried with different boot 
floppies and even the original DOS distribution disk with the 
same result. All the boot disks boot my notebook OK. The CMOS 
setup is OK. The POST report nothing. All my diag programs 
report no problems except MSD which locks up my system. So 
does MS Editor, Scandisk and Defrag. When MS Editor and MSD are 
run from Windows they work fine. When it locks up and I reboot 
from the Hard Drive the system can't find my mouse. I wait a 
minute and cold reboot from Hard Drive, it boots fine. The 
floppy works fine otherwise. I can install programs from it and 
copy to/from it. Wierd stuff. Anyone got any ideas.

Happy New Year!