Zip drive no longer works

Hi

I need some help to get my generic panasonic 100 MB zip drive to work. I don't know if a virus or adware killed the drive. I recently used hijackthis and the tech help from this site to get rid of some adware stuff. I doubt it was from fixing the adware stuff that killed my zip drive.

I've looked inside my device manager and checked the zip drive entry. There is on question mark or exclamation mark beside the zip drive. I've used the uninstall feature of win xp to uninstall the drivers then reboot the cmput. The zip drive was detected and drivers reinstalled (I think). But when I put a zip disk in I get an error message saying to insert disk in drive e (which is my zip drive).

In the process of installing iomega's drivers. I tried putting in a zip disk still the same error as before.

Could my problem be that I sometimes forget to take out my zip disk so when I reboot I quickly eject the disk during boot up before the loading of windows?

I'm in the process of running trend micro virus scan right now. Could this be virus or adware related?

help please
thanks
meh

 

This may be a driver/software issue, or it could be hardware, zip drives don't last forever. Can you try the zip on another machine?

 

Don't worry about leaving the zip disk in, I not had a problem, with mine. I've left it in, going on three different computer's now. I started with w95, next computer and w98, and this computer using xp. Some times I even unplug the zip drive when I'm not using it...........wobbles

 

It's messed up man. Nothing worked so I disconnected the zip drive and tried it on another computer, guess what it work!!!! SO I took the zip drive back to my original cmput disconnected the power and the data cable from both ends this time since I already tried disconnecting the power and data cable from the drive only to no success. I replugged the 2ndary IDE connector on mobo and the part that goes into the drive. Now it works. What the hell was that!!??? Could it be that my data cable is starting to die on me? Would a lack of power, as in the power supply not being sufficient, cause this type of strange occurances? Right now I'm just keeping an eye on things and if it happens again I'll try a new data cable.

any ideas? Thanks

meh