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ATAPI Zip drive on a Hackintosh... Pipe Dream?

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Motherboard
Gigabyte GA-X58-UD3R
CPU
Intel Core i7
Graphics
HD 5850
Mac
  1. MacBook Pro
  2. Mac mini
  3. Mac Pro
Classic Mac
  1. Plus
  2. Power Mac
  3. Quadra
Mobile Phone
  1. iOS
(I did several searches and didn't find what I was looking for, so apologies if this is an oft-asked/answered question and I missed it. Skip down to the TL;DR to avoid the potentially boring details.)

So, I have several Iomega Zip 100 disks with old Mac files (Circa 1993) on them that I would like to get copied onto my NAS for long-term archiving, and for use either via emulation on modern Macs/PCs, or maybe even on this potential future Hackintosh if the performance and maintenance aren't too bad. This is my ultimate goal, getting these files on my NAS. (I've setup the NAS as an AFS share, and I've already copied several hundred floppy discs to it, so I know that part works.) I have the original SCSI Iomega zip drive that I used to write these files to disk, but I can't get it to work on the four classic SCSI Macintoshes that I have at my disposal. I suspect this drive is dead, although it does power up.

I also have an ATAPI Zip drive, and last night I installed it onto an old machine (Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R mobo and Gigabyte HD 5850 GPU) that I upgraded to Windows 10 last month, and I found a Windows program that can read Mac HFS disks, and I was thinking I had it made. I started copying the zip disks to my NAS, but the program copies the files temporarily to the Windows HD before putting them on the network, so there went all my resource forks, and many of the files are useless. (I verified this last night using Basilisk II.)

So I thought, what if I turn this Windows PC into a Hackintosh, and remove Windows from the equation, and copy the files that way?

So this is my question (TL;DR): is it reasonable to expect that I can get an ATAPI Zip drive to work and copy Mac files using the GA-X58A-UD3R mobo?

This post by vijayp gives me hope. I was surprised when searches for ATAPI Zip Drive didn't turn up much info here. I guess this is more a edge case than I thought.

Anyway, thanks for reading.
 
This piqued my interest as I dimly remember using Zip drives back in the day briefly, briefly because they were unreliable in my experience. I remember the unreliable part more clearly.
I am assuming the Zip drives are formatted with the MacOS journaled format that is still readable in MacOS. If that is the case then a utility like Paragon may be able to read the zip drive and write its data to an appropriately formatted portable USB hard drive. If that works then you should be able to use whatever MacOS system you have to do whatever you want with the data.
If the data is intact and readable.
But if you don't know what is on the discs and haven't missed the data in 27 years?
 
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I do know what is on the disks, and some of I want to retrieve very badly. Granted, this is a small percentage of the total, maybe 20%, but still... I'm fairly certain that most of the data is intact, my Zip disks are not giving me the "click of death" just yet, but I am worried they may start doing so soon, which is why I want to get them on something more long-term stable. Also, the copies that I made all seemed to work fine, except for apps that have a separate resource fork, which was lost when the file was written temporarily to an NTFS drive before being copied to the network. (At least, that is my theory.)

I'm pretty sure that since these disks were formatted in the early 90s (System 7 or 8), which means they are likely HFS volumes, not HFS+ and therefore are probably not journaled. But I'll give this Paragon a look. Thanks for the suggestion.
 
@Taxi,

Iomega Zip drives (the hardware) where (are) incredibly unreliable ...

It was very common for the alignment of the read/write head to drift resulting in the drive being no longer able to read data that it had already written which also meant that data written on one drive was often not readable on different drive.

Iomega was actually sued over this issue by millions of unhappy users which eventually ended the era of the zip drive.

The issue is known as "The Click of Death" referring to the sound the heads made when it was trying to read data via miss-aligned heads. It was a truly awful storage solution that history unfortunately will not forget due to the massive amounts of data lost by users.

There are a few experts on the subject ... google should be able to help you find someone who may be able to help.

I wish you the best of luck ...

Cheers
Jay
 
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Okay, I get it. You guys don't like Zip drives. Thanks.
 
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