Home Forums FineTunedMac Community Lounge After 4 years a stuck Zip disk ejected

Interesting saga, perhaps. But exciting, not at all…

On a 10 year old G4, DP 800, 10.4.11

This old machine still works (as well as it ever did). Well, except for the 100 MB Zip disk that suffered the dreded “Click Of Death” about 4 years ago, and has been stuck in the bowels of the machine ever since.

I tried (unsuccessfully) every suggestion known to man (and woman) to free that critter, even though most opined that I would need to remove and then open the Zip drive in order to liberate the disk. Having suffered failure and having no need of the Zip drive, I forgot about the problem, though once in a while I would again go though the Eject drill. A palliative bromide that never did bring joy…

Yesterday, I used the machine to park some files on the HD and when I subsequently shut down, voilà, out pops the disk.

Now I haven’t a clue what caused this, as I do not (even) know what holds the disk in place. I can only guess some spring suffered fatigue/failure and thus released its death grip.

Anyone care to venture a guess?

It's a Zip drive. What else is there to say?!
They were notorious for dying exactly one day after the warranty ran out. And nobody (especially IT personnel) wanted to 'crack' the things, opining that it'd be cheaper just to get a new drive (which is inevitably what happened, with the same results).
Fortunately, the grip of Zip drives on the industry died out just like the dinosaurs. Luv them doorstops!

You beat me to the draw on that one. That is exactly what I was going to say.

On the plus side, I took the opportunity to beak open the Zip diskette. Amazed, I was, at how little there is there.

And on that note, it seems clear, that all my future machines will no moving parts.