Okay, so today I'm at this computer store my buddy works at. Jokingly I say to him, "So, got any tape drives?" I was surprised to hear the response come back as, "Yeah, actually, we do. There's one in the dollar bin over there." Excitedly, I fished it out, expecting it to be a retro piece of crappy hardware. I was blown away to see written on the front that it stores 2 gigs of information. However, I'm having some issues installing it into my computer. The first time I tried to do it, it didn't find any of my hard drives. I figured out that problem, though. Hooked it up to an IDE made for a hard drive or CD-ROM. (It's built to handle the twisted floppy type IDE.) I then tested it with the floppy IDE. The computer started up fine, but on opening My Computer, it strangely still displayed drive A as a 3 1/2 floppy. And then my computer froze. On top of all this, all my IDE plugs on the motherboard are taken up, so I either have to find a dual plug floppy IDE (like the ones often used to hook up multiple hard drives and CDs within a computer, you know, the ones with two hookups) or switch between the two. But with it freaking out and freezing my computer, it's useless to me. Can anybody help me solve my problem here? I'd love to hook this thing up and get it running. After all, 2 gigs of storage is nothing to scoff at. I can back up tons of stuff. If it helps any, I'm running Windows 98SE on an ASRock motherboard equipped with an AMD 2000+. And before anyone questions whether the device is broken or not, I don't think it is. It powered on just fine, the computer turned on without error, and I did my classic "smell for fried electronics" test. So I've got no idea what's wrong. Are you a bad enough dude to rescue my tape drive? Oh, and the tape drive is an iomega ditto 2GB, internal model.

Generally tape drives were not PnP. 'My Computer' would not see them as drives. The backup software would be the only way to access them. I believe that's the way it was even with Travan drives up to 20 gig. I'm not sure about the Ditto drives. You need to go to IOmega's site and look for info and drivers there. Oh, the floppy cable is just called the 'floppy cable'. IDE is a designation for 40-pin IDE devices.

Okay, I'm gonna go look into drivers and software and whatnot. In the meantime, is there such a thing as a floppy cable with 2 plugs? Because that would ultimately solve one of the two problems. And software and drivers should solve the other.

What brand drive is it? I had one that was about that capacity and it had a PCI based controller card that was seen as a floppy drive. The unit worked fine under WFW 3.11 & Win95B but I could never get it to work right in Win98. They are REALLY SLOWWW too.

My first thoughts on this were 'most tape drives are SCSI. A quick visit to Iomega's web site corrected this. The internal drive does indeed use a floppy interface. Most floppy cables have two plugs. Go back and see your friend, he possibly has a box full of used cables out the back. If not, he will sell ou one for a few dollars.

And if you're still looking at their site. Some info here :-) Right side middle, you can use the link to get a manual, ect. Iomega Ditto Info Good luck S.T.A.R.

Just in case you aren't aware of it, the drive connected to the end connector of a floppy cable will be the 'A:' drive. the middle connector will be the 'B:' drive.