adapt 25 pin parallel to USB cable

phil-k · 21 Aug 2012 at 15:41

I have an Iomega Zip drive which I want to pull some old photos and files off, of course now pcs do not have a 25 pin serial connector, so I bought what I thought was a USB to 25 pin serial cable, but it is actually a parallel printer USB adaptor, my fault I did not read the description properly.
My question is can I swap any of the wires around to enable me to retrieve the files off the zip drive ( I do not need to write to it)
Thanks

bremen1874 · 21 Aug 2012 at 21:43

I'm fairly certain that a Zip drive would have connected to a parallel (LTP) port not a serial port. A serial port just wouldn’t have been fast enough.

Is the 25 pin connector male or female?

phil-k · 21 Aug 2012 at 21:49

the port the original cable fits in is male, hence the female connector I got as picture above
thats why I bought this cable in the first place because it said parallel, but if I plug my zip drive in with it, Windows recognises it and says it has installed a driver for it, but the zip drive does not show up in the list of drives, I imagine it thinks it is attached to a printer the way the cable is wired up

bremen1874 · 22 Aug 2012 at 12:59

Were parallel connected Zip drives plug-and-play? It may just need a driver installing (in addition to the driver for the USB adapter) before it'll recognise the drive.

USB based serial and parallel adapters are always a bit of a gamble. A PCI parallel port add-in card could be a better option.

PistolPete · 22 Aug 2012 at 13:37

Which model Zip drive is it??

PhillyDee · 22 Aug 2012 at 13:40

bremen1874 said:
Were parallel connected Zip drives plug-and-play? It may just need a driver installing (in addition to the driver for the USB adapter) before it'll recognise the drive.

USB based serial and parallel adapters are always a bit of a gamble. A PCI parallel port add-in card could be a better option.

Zip drives were never plug and play, and you needed to install the Iomega software suite for them. I still have my Zip-100 and 7 cartridges. Cannot bear to bin it! Was invaluable when I first bought it. I know there is nothing on the discs though.

I do have an IBM usb to legacy port adapter. As long as you return it, and have mm trust enabled, then give me a shout and I can dig it out. Pretty sure it should work!

Oh, you will probably need XP at the latest, as I very much doubt there is any compatible software for anything later.

One · 22 Aug 2012 at 13:46

Read on the internet about which converter works. I know for a fact that for serial port to usb you need a converter that used the FTDI chip as there are a few chips out there but this is the only one that works on Win7.

phil-k · 22 Aug 2012 at 20:50

tried downloading and installing driver but still no luck, I can get a more modern usb zip drive cheap off ebay so I might do that just to get my files retrieved
Thanks for the info anyway

andy_mk3 · 23 Aug 2012 at 00:40

Got a friend with an old-ish PC with a parallel port you could use?

deshepherd · 23 Aug 2012 at 17:19

PhillyDee said:
Oh, you will probably need XP at the latest, as I very much doubt there is any compatible software for anything later.

May need earlier than XP ... when APS cameras came out ~15 years ago I thought that they, plus the "FilmDrive" that Kodak produced were a great way to get pictures into the digital world (you stuck a processed APS film cartridge into the filmdrive and it would the scan the negatives into JPEGs etc). My only misgiving was that they only produced a parallel port interface version. Anyway, I got one and used it a bit .... and still have it around for (now very) occasional use ... but it only works on an ancient PC which retained a win98 partition purely for this!

N.b. I also had a Zip drive ... but had the SCSI version!