Share your knowledge on these two classic MPCs
By huh? Sun Feb 26, 2023 7:55 am
I know I shouldn’t be f#@king with zip disks in 2023 but has this ever happened to any 3000 users (3.11 OS) where you’re saving a beat and you start to hear your zip drive going crazy, so you unplug it, plug it back in, try saving it again, it saves (let’s say on partition D) then all of a sudden, all the beats you made on partition A is over written and duplicated by partition D? Even the duplicated version (partition A) doesn’t even play because I get the error message “This file is internally corrupted and can’t be loaded: it’s internal type ID doesn’t match its 3-letter name extension.”

Maaan, wtf is going on? Been on this 3000 for 15 years and never once had a problem like this. Luckily, all the beats on partition B, C & D are good. Just partition A is lost now
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By Telefunky Sun Feb 26, 2023 12:31 pm
If a Zip drive starts to develop this behavior backup whatever you need asap.
In this phase the drive still reads fairly reliably, but things will only go worse.
I don‘t remember all details, but essentially the drive (when writing) will change media in a way that make fail another (replacement) drive, too. :shock:
(yes, it‘s hard to imagine... but really happened a lot ages ago)
Consider yourself lucky to have at least achieved a 15 years lifespan.
By huh? Sun Feb 26, 2023 3:45 pm
Has anything similar like this happened to you? Consider myself lucky for sure, bought that Iomega 250 zip drive brand new 15 years back, but as of late, the zip drive would make these random click sounds every now and then (I ignored it) annnd this is the results. My fault and mistake. So I’m pretty much SOL? Is there such thing as a recovery software for zip disk in 2023?
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By peterpiper Sun Feb 26, 2023 6:28 pm
AFAIK MPC3000 files/disks won't be recognized by a PC so there isn't a recovery software. You can make an image file of the disk (clone the disk) as backup. But you'll have to spend some time first to get a PC with a SCSI card and WinXP or Win7 (I don't know a SCSI card with Win10 driver). And the correct SCSI cable (depending on the connector of the zipdrive and the SCSI card).

But this is just a backup solution to not loose more of your files.

For the future you could use a more reliable storage system like MO-Disks or SD cards. But to get completly off from the zipdrive you probably have to copy the files manually from the zip to an MO-Disk or SD card.

The images you create are clones of a disk so a 250MB zip disk image can't be copied to a 128MB or 230MB MO disk (it might work with 540MB disks but then you 'sacrifice' 290MB of the disk).
I don't know if its possible to get more than 1 image file on a SD card (yes, it works with floppy images but I don't know about zipdisk images).

peace
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By Telefunky Sun Feb 26, 2023 9:00 pm
huh? wrote:Has anything similar like this happened to you? ...

Yes it has... after 3 dead drives I gave up :Sigh: (but my in my case it was the 100MB version)

here‘s a link describing transfer of MPC disk content to a Mac
viewtopic.php?f=4&t=2204
it‘s a bit complicated (MacOS writes data to disk that obviously confuses the MPC), so the author built a strategy based on „transfer disks“ to NEVER expose any of his originals to MacOS.

this might be useful to understand the MPC disk format
https://www.chickensys.com/translator/d ... aimpc.html
(MPC 3000 is near the bottom of the page)
Their Translator software may help to save your data in less steps, but dunno details.

something about the „click of death“ (as it‘s called)
https://www.grc.com/tip/codfaq8.htm
In the 6th section he mentions the 1 condition that may cause a replacement drive to get damaged by reading a screwed disk. Fortunately it‘s rare.

best of luck, Tom
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By richie Tue Feb 28, 2023 1:09 am
The problem with the click of death is that it's tiered in a couple of regions : First being that the drive itself develops a fault, the write/read head then physically damages the zip disk and then corrupts the data on it. When there is physical damage to the disk, there really isn't anything that can be done to recover the data as it is unreadable at that point.

There are technically ways around it to some extent, provided the size of the damaged sector is small, some have managed to make a disk image like peterpiper noted, and then play around with the hex data to try to get the corrupted data to 'read' again.

I feel for you man but for the love of all beat gods, you need to upgrade to a card reader. They're too cheap to not do it. Literally half the responses I leave on this forum are directing people to do it, save yourself heartache and consider doing it moving forward.