[PARPORT] zipdrive weirdness

From: Allin Cottrell (cottrell@ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu)
Date: Thu Mar 16 2000 - 10:12:36 EST

  • Next message: Tim Waugh: "Re: [PARPORT] zipdrive weirdness"

    Hello all,

    I posted a short while ago about data corruption in files backed
    up to a 100MB Iomega parallel port zipdrive. This is under
    Linux 2.2.14, with the zip disks DOS-formatted and mounted as
    vfat, on an IBM ThinkPad 390E. The zipdrive is quite old, but
    worked fine under Linux until a month or so ago (since which
    time I've updated various bits of my system including the kernel
    and glibc).

    Somebody suggested the drive itself might be at fault. A
    reasonable supposition, but I've now booted win98 (same machine,
    same drive, same disks) and I'm able to access all the files
    without a problem. E.g. winzip can read the backup tar.gz's OK,
    while under Linux tar/gzip complained of "crc error" and "format
    violation". I also tried the experiment of copying some tar.gz
    files from the zipdrive to the DOS partition on my hard drive,
    using win98. Result: After rebooting to Linux I can read the
    copied archives on the DOS hard drive partition OK but still get
    errors trying to access them off the zipdrive itself.

    Further stuff: I recompiled kernel 2.2.14 using gcc 2.7.2.3
    instead of gcc 2.95.2, and choosing the 16-bit EPP option for
    parport. No difference, but in the process I realized that
    parport wasn't using EPP anyway, rather SP/2. So I went into
    BIOS setup and changed the parallel port to EPP. Now, finally,
    things are better, but I'm _still_ seeing errors on some of the
    backup files, including those just created.

    Anyone have a notion of what on earth is happening? My system
    doesn't seem to be broken in any other respect. In conf.modules
    I have:

    alias parport_lowlevel parport_pc
    alias scsi_hostadapter ppa
    options parport_pc io=0x378 irq=7

    On mounting the zipdrive the message is:

    parport0: PC-style at 0x378, irq 7 [SPP,PS2,EPP]
    ppa: Version 2.03 (for Linux 2.2.x)
    ppa: Found device at ID 6, Attempting to use EPP 16 bit
    ppa: Communication established with ID 6 using EPP 16 bit
    scsi0 : Iomega VPI0 (ppa) interface
    scsi : 1 host.
      Vendor: IOMEGA Model: ZIP 100 Rev: C.18
      Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI
    revision: 02
    Detected scsi removable disk sda at scsi0, channel 0, id 6, lun 0
    SCSI device sda: hdwr sector= 512 bytes. Sectors= 196608 [96 MB]
    [0.1 GB]
    sda: Write Protect is off
     sda: sda4

    Allin Cottrell.

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