The Iomega ZIP drive is a popular, low-cost, low-performance, portable, removable media disk drive. Its disks have a capacity of 96 megabytes, and the drive is available in two main versions, a SCSI version and a parallel port version. The parallel port version is actually a SCSI device as well, configured to use Iomega’s proprietary PPA-3 SCSI-over-parallel protocol.

This document describes how to use the ZIP drive with Linux. Since this is a SCSI device, it is important for you to read the SCSI HOWTO as well. That document gives a thorough introduction to the Linux SCSI system. It does not contain any specific information about the ZIP drive, the ZIP Zoom SCSI host adapter or the PPA-3 parallel-to-SCSI adapter. This mini-HOWTO aims to fill those gaps.

This document incorporates information collected and published by others, in particular:

I thank them for their important contributions, and accept responsibility for any errors that I have introduced.