Re: SecureDrive News - Win95 yes, Iomega zip drive no

At 02:33 AM 9/16/95 PDT, you wrote:

>I'm sorry to report that SecureDrive does not support the Iomega ZIP
>drive.  I believe that's because the TSR driver supplied with the
>hardware does not support a DiskBIOS interface.
>
>I had thought that Secure Device, another real-time encryption system,
>would support this drive, since it works through a device driver
>mapped to a dos file.  But an actual trial proved otherwise.  The
>problem is that the DOS file must be present when the CONFIG.SYS
>DEVICE= statement for the SECDEV.SYS is processed. But the zip drive
>driver is a TSR that doesn't get loaded until after all DEVICE
>statements have been processed.  There's no particular reason that
>Iomega couldn't have written their driver as an MSDOS device driver
>rather than a TSR, in which case SecureDevice would probably work, but
>they didn't, so it doesn't.

There is a Win95 driver for the Zip drive that does not a TSR.  It is a
parallel to SCSI driver that is added through the "add hardware" control
panel.  I am not certain as to the order that the drivers load.  I will have
to test it.  (The driver was released on the 9th of this month with little
or no instructions.)

Having encrypted Zip drives would be VERY useful.  I will see if Borland's
latest update for the C++ compiler has any additional information as to some
of the driver interface issues (I doubt it, but it is worth a try).  It is
supposed to arrive "any day now", but it is backordered so who knows when I
will get it.
I may have to spend the bucks and get the Microsoft development disc
subscription again.  It will most likely have the information needed to
convert the drivers to something Win95 will understand.

|             Visualize whirled keys              | alano@teleport.com   |
|"It's only half a keyserver. I had to split the  | Disclaimer:          |
|other half with the government man." - Black Art | Ignore the man       |
|   -- PGP 2.6.2 key available on request --      |  behind the keyboard.|
|         http://www.teleport.com/~alano          |       <fnord>        |

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>Date: Sat, 16 Sep 1995 13:13:49 -0700
>From: Alan Olsen <alano@teleport.com>
>
>At 02:33 AM 9/16/95 PDT, you wrote:
>
>>I'm sorry to report that SecureDrive does not support the Iomega ZIP
>>drive.  I believe that's because the TSR driver supplied with the
>>hardware does not support a DiskBIOS interface.
>>
>>I had thought that Secure Device, another real-time encryption system,
>>would support this drive, since it works through a device driver
>>mapped to a dos file.  But an actual trial proved otherwise.  The
>>problem is that the DOS file must be present when the CONFIG.SYS
>>DEVICE= statement for the SECDEV.SYS is processed. But the zip drive
>>driver is a TSR that doesn't get loaded until after all DEVICE
>>statements have been processed.
[...]

	Have you tried an 'INSTALL=' line in the CONFIG.SYS to load
the drive's TSR first?  INSTALL is a rarely-documented feature for the
CONFIG.SYS to load a TSR during its processing.  I believe it also
saves memory by not loading some sort of header to into memory (DOS
PSP maybe?), which may also cause a problem.  Can't hurt to try
though, eh?

darky
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