Bought online for EUR 22.
At first I got worried because it was just clicking. I thought I got one with the click of death, But after some 15 minutes of several retries, it got quieter and eventually started loading disks.
Curiosity killed the cat. I was curious to see what’s on them:
The ones on left had no files, the 2 on right did. Mostly the F disk. The top one had some program called powerdvd 4.
On the F one, photorec found some TTF files (fonts), exe files, 4 second videos of motorcycle speeding up and fireworks, CompCore Multimedia inc. SoftPeg bitmap banner, and some random TXT files with variables and program descriptions.
Stored undeleted were game saves of following games: Etherlords, Gorasul, Hooligans, Operation Flashpoint (incl. exe), Renegade, Sacrifice, Serious Sam - The second encounter
There were also some spreadsheets with lists of games, and of course RAR archive with colection of generic porn.
The only interesting file is spreadsheet with list of compenents for a “new computer”. Most files were dates around 2002.
Case - Miditower ATX
MOBO - Microstar MS KT266 Pro2 RU VIA PRO266A
CPU - AMD Athlon XP 1900+ Socket A
Cooler - Evercool MT2 Platinum Socket A DMI
RAM - DDR PC333 CL2.5 Kingmax 256MB
FDD - Alps 3.5" 1.44MB
HDD - Seagate ST340016A, Barracuda IV, 2MB (buffer), 7200rpm
GPU - Microstar MS8853 G3 Titan 500 Pro, 64MB TVout
Network - Ovislink
Porn rar? Jackpot
I’ve got mine in a box somewhere. Should dig it up and see if it still works.
I kinda want to see those vintage fonts… Anything interesting?
Eh, they didn’t look like anything interesting, and I already wiped the VM where I recovered the files (which I used as I didn’t know what’s going to be on there).
Glad I’m not the only one that gets tempted to buy random old hardware just to see what’s on it. Often times data ends up being entirely uninteresting or wiped, but a ZipDisk drive was one of the few times I got to see some stuff laying around. It was mostly just some small bitmaps of drawn ladies, but also a number of journal entries from an older gentleman who originally had the drive too.
That last bit seems like it would be of interest to someone who studies early 2000s history. I love neat little stuff like that that isn’t really private, but also wasn’t intended to be seen by anyone else.
Edit: I was doing some light searching on a few of the components to see if I could get an idea on whether this was a high end build at the time or not, and it looks like at least one item on the list (DDR PC333 CL2.5 Kingmax 256MB, the RAM) is no longer findable on the internet. Or at least I can’t find anything through DDG or Google, someone else may be able to. Neat example of how much 2000s internet just vanished.
Someone gave me an old tower with an IDE ZIP drive. That can work in a modern machine using an IDE PCI or PCIE card… so I had to get one with the parallel interface for use with 80s DOS machines, where the 100MB ZIP is larger than the hard drive. Easy file transfer! PalmZIP is the homebrew DOS driver with a fraction of the RAM usage and size of Iomega’s.
Hey OP, you forgot to add a rule to the title, just sayin’.
Oh no!
Too late, the mods are on my way, hold on, I hear someone knocking on the door -
I need one of those but USB compatible. I have a stack of disks whose data I’d love to retrieve.
You can get one.
Here’s the rear of this one:
The model is Z100USBV.
PowerDVD was, for several years one of the few ways to play a DVD movie on your PC.
Found the Action Retro fan? He recently did a video about a zip disk device.
Psh, casuals. I’ve been hoarding zip drives for years.
Honestly IDK how I keep getting so many of them, but they’re not very reliable so I guess I’ll keep them.
I’ve seen it, but that was just 3 days ago, I ordered this 13 days ago.
People were still using zipdisks in 2002?
Apple was still selling computers with them built in in 2002.
Remember, USB drives barely existed back then, and they sucked. Floppy was all but dead. Burning a CD with your 1MB word file was the only way to move files back and forth for peasants.
For sure, that was only a few years after their apex. My family’s drive had been retired to a drawer by then but we pulled it out regularly to access the GBs we still had on the disks.
My family was. We had four computers at that time and zip disks were how we shared files between them. I remember in 2003 still using floppy disks even. I think it wasn’t until like 2005 I started using thumb drives.
