Jaz Drive - Windows 7

[Dartful Dodger]

I was going through my box of electronics for Christmas light stuff, and I found the Jaz drive I used in college.

I don't think I've started it for at least 10 years and it may have spent a few years in an unheated garage.

Just for kicks I wanted to see what was on it. The (10 year old) computer I'm upgrading my Mame cab with has the right port for it. I plugged it in hoping I'd be able to see what cutting edge stuff I was working on 10 years ago, but the drive wouldn't load. It kept telling me the drive needed to be reformatted.

10 years ago I was a Mac guy, but the Jaz disk has PC printed on it. I'm almost positive it was a PC disk because I needed to use it at school. Not even my job has an old Mac with the right ports to run this so I can’t test it on a Mac.

I'm thinking the disk itself is dead, but I have projects I worked on in college, so I don't want to give up on the drive.

Are there any tricks I can use to try and read this disk?

[ark_ader]

Is it a SCSI Jaz version?  Or is it the Parallel type?

I have the same drive in my old crap box, that I used for my NT4 box.

Had the same problem when reading it on XP.  I wonder if it has anything to do with NTFS mixed mode.

Are these drives worth anything now?

[fallacy]

I remember using those in collage. I stopped using it because either A. someone would steal it, they were kind of expensive or B. they seemed to always corrupt your data if you took the drive out incorrectly. I just stuck with Zip disk even though they were smaller.

[Howard_Casto]

I wish I could help.  Even back then I had the foresight to realize that a 100 dollar portable disk probably wasn't going to remain the standard for very long.  I stuck to $1 floppies.   

On a somewhat related topic, I've often wondered why people keep stuff on removable media and expect it to keep.  I've still got files on my current computer from 1996.  Why?  Well when I buy a new pc I take the time to transfer anything good over.  Sure I back em up on other media but the best way to make sure that you can still get to data is to store it on a harddisk. 

[Dartful Dodger]

I went to school for video and animation, before personal CD burners. 1 floppy wasn't going to cut it. I had the foresight to realize that 1000 $1 floppies was going to cost me more than 1 $100 Jaz disk.

Some people didn't have Jaz drives and just stored their projects on the school's servers and made copies of their video and animations onto Beta tapes at the end of the semester, but they couldn't back up all their raw or working files. And that's if the school's server didn't crash, get a virus or corrupted. At the end of my Lightwave class an Asian girl was crying because her files were deleted from the server before she could make a copy of them.

I don't think there's anything on this drive worth crying over. I created a D-Paint animation in school. I have the animation on Beta, but I'm hoping there's a digital copy on this drive.

[fallacy]

I went to school for video and animation, before personal CD burners. 1 floppy wasn't going to cut it. I had the foresight to realize that 1000 $1 floppies was going to cost me more than 1 $100 Jaz disk.

Some people didn't have Jaz drives and just stored their projects on the school's servers and made copies of their video and animations onto Beta tapes at the end of the semester, but they couldn't back up all their raw or working files. And that's if the school's server didn't crash, get a virus or corrupted. At the end of my Lightwave class an Asian girl was crying because her files were deleted from the server before she could make a copy of them.

I don't think there's anything on this drive worth crying over. I created a D-Paint animation in school. I have the animation on Beta, but I'm hoping there's a digital copy on this drive.

That sounds too familiar. Did you happen to go to the Art Institute of Colorado around  2002 time?
http://www.artinstitutes.edu/denver/

[lilshawn]

with this drive being so old, often the gyro stabilization used inside the cartridge gets old and looses it's effectiveness... the vibrations from the motor render the disk unreadable since the heads can't track the disk properly.

EDIT:

i remember at one time iomega used to have a data recovery business... (kinda shows how reliable their products are) dunno if they still do or not.

[Dartful Dodger]

That sounds too familiar. Did you happen to go to the Art Institute of Colorado around  2002 time?
http://www.artinstitutes.edu/denver/

Columbia, Chicago. around 96.

It's an art school. Security on the servers were nonexistent. I think each class had a folder and inside that folder was a folder for each student. Nothing was locked or blocked, you could look into any folder for any class.

The servers would fill up fast and students would delete other students' files (even other classes' folders) to make room for their files. Around finals the server would always get a virus. It seemed like students infected the computer so they could have something to blame for not having their project done in time. I lost a HyperCard project to the Christmas Tree virus.

It was crazy I can’t believe how things were run back then and how people put up with it. I couldn't, that's why I bought the Jaz.

[Howard_Casto]

Dang man!  If AIC still had unprotected servers and was using Jaz drives in 2002 then I would demand my money back!

I guess I forget that some schools had.... ahem... less than competant network admins.  I worked in the computer center for my university when I went there so I guess I had a more vested interest in the security of the data.  Mind you it's still a university so you can only do so much... mostly because the professors are too stupid to figure out anything complex.    We did keep everything running and backup any network storage daily though.  We also allowed students to password protect their storage area and give them individual network rights, meaning that nobody could even look at their folders unless they let em. 

This was 98-2001 and we were a fairly tiny university.  You would think AIC would do a little better considering their promenance.