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Stuck Jaz Disk
Posted by: PiperTheGreat on 2025-03-30 21:17:40
Hello everyone,

In a bit of a bind here, working on a little project, and I have an internal Jaz 2GB drive, in an external enclosure, and I was just testing it, read the disk fine, but it seemed to have issues formatting a 1GB disk I inserted.

I then decided to eject the disk, but while it made an electronic noise, the disk did not come back out, should have perhaps detected that something was wrong when there was a little too much resistance when inserting the disk. All I see now is a flashing amber light....

So, question is, how on earth do I get this thing out? :S Any help is appreciated. I know these drives are not reliable.... Have I broken it? or was it likely already dead?
Posted by: flintlock1 on 2025-04-01 02:13:07
Hi Piper, I have just watched your video (thanks for the video, keep up the great work). Just to check, have you made sure that each device has a seperate id number, and have you enabled any hardware termination or terminator device on the end of your scsi chain of devices. Jaz and Zip drives can be a pain to work with, especially when you get problems like these.
Posted by: chelseayr on 2025-04-01 03:38:10
I doubt this is related to the iomega drives but on a funny note, the imagination ls120 drive doesn't "like" 800kb disks when being used with osx and in a weird way actually won't want to eject these at all - but you don't have to freak out, just pull power cord out then the usb cable .. then plug power back in and it'll more or less automatically eject the 'offending' disk, and plug usb back in
Posted by: Forrest on 2025-04-01 21:51:24
FYI the LS-120 drive is not compatible with Mac 400k/800k disks
Posted by: chelseayr on 2025-04-02 05:09:55
yeah I figured that as much early on and unfortunately a 800kb disk looks very much like a 1.44mb disk so I pretty much did have to 'power-thump' the drive quite a few times till I had finally skimmed through the heap of non-retail disks I had, with the 800kb[and 400kb?] ones being set to the side to go back into closet 'for the time being' (aka for when I would have a desk powermac working again instead of the ibook+ls120 temporary setup I was then using)

at least by a lucky token I had been able to set a few particular disks aside early on when I realized after power-ejecting the first and only one that maybe just maybe the black-not-silver shutter was thankfully telling me that this was not a 1.44mb disk .. am I perhaps correct in this possible guess @Forrest ?
Posted by: LaPorta on 2025-04-02 07:10:22
No extra square cutout in the corner = 400/800k disk.
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