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Please note also - THIS BLOG ENDS HERE WITH THE LAST ENTRY FROM NOVEMBER 9th 2021.

I have prepared a new blog with wordpress at https://vintagecomputing.info !!!

Thank you.

After using my parallel port ZIP 100 drive very often for transferring files to my vintage Amstrad PC 1640 (I used an USB ZIP drive for my modern PC, too), it dropped about 50cm down to the ground (front side first). It didn't worked anymore, so I thought it would be a good idea to open it, looking for a circuit path interruption or similar.
BUT. You can't open it without destroying it. These plastic brackets will break, see first image where they're located.

The good thing - now I can take a look at the board...

You see a large chip made from Iomega, named Phaethon (or at least branded with Iomega).
There are two other chips as well, I guess one of them is used to convert it to a parallel port signal. The red circles in the secound picture marking the flat ribbon cable connectors from the motor board.
Fortunately ZIP 100 drives aren't still too expensive at *bay, so I just have to get another one again. The DOS driver from Mr. Peichl ( see related link ) is still working fine, although I was *not* able to use the driver with Compaq MS-DOS 3.31, which runs well on an Amstrad PC 1640 and bigger hard drives (I had to copy the keyboard driver program from the original Amstrad MS-DOS 3.20 and patched it for version 3.31). So I finally had to take MS-DOS 5.0 for using PALMZIP.SYS instead of Compaq DOS 3.31 (with had a smaller memory footprint).

P.S.: Someone already tried to open it also, see http://www.techrepublic.com/pictures/cr ... zip-drive/