Warning: if your old Zip drive clicks and you keep powering it on, you can lose everything on the disk

David Johnson · 2026-10-12T10:30:03.323868+00:00

I picked up an Iomega Zip 100 drive at a garage sale in Denver for $8 and got greedy with my old band recordings from 1998. The drive started making a click click click sound, so like an idiot I kept hitting eject and reinserting to see if it would catch, and after 4 tries the disk came back as unreadable. Turns out that clicking is the head smacking the platter, and every spin you give it grinds off more of the magnetic coating. Pop the disk out the second you hear it and find a second drive to read it in, because the drive is usually the bad part, not the disk. Has anyone here actually fixed a clicking Zip drive, or do you just keep a spare around for rescue reads?

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Warning: if your old Zip drive clicks and you keep powering it on, you can lose everything on the disk | Classic Tech Throwbacks - Free To Speak