Hello (not sure if I'm in the right forum...)

I tried to format my Iomega zip disks 100MB in order to delete their contents and start backing up fresh data into them. The drive is built-in. I tried first ting the Iomega Zip Disk Forum but no response and do hope someone here might help? I have WinXP Home Ed., IE 6.0, Outlook Express 6.0. The problem:

1. When the first formatting showed to be completed it just hanged in there for a long time. I finally had to press "cancel" to get out of it. Tried again and with different disks and the same thing happened.

2. So I thought I wanted to SEE the contents, and tried to open it by inserting a half full disk and clicking on "(D) Zip 100" from the "Look In" drop down window, and a msg said: "Please insert a disk into the drive D"....when it was already inserted!

3. Then I tried to open it by clicking on "Removable Disk [D:]" from "My Documents" drop down list, and a popup msg said "Zip 100 references an item that does not exist. The item will not be returned to the application."

I repeated the above with my other zip disks with the same results. Please does anyone know what this means, what I'm doing wrong and how to make them work? Thanks ever so much for any help! Adela

When you insert a disk, do you hear a distinctive clicking sound, possibly that you never noticed before?

Insert a disk and go to Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Computer Management and click on Disk Management. Do you see your Zip disk? Try to format it from there. If no go, it sounds like your Zip drive has failed. Zip drives were notorious for failing, and yours has lasted a long time. Actually, you can get a USB flash drive, 1 gig for under $20 now, and a 4 gig drive for under $30 from Newegg.com Faster, more storage, and more portable by far.