A wild guess, but could you be exceeding the capacity of your power supply?
I once had a Gateway that would not boot if I left an external USB hub
attached. The hub worked fine elsewhere, and other USB devices worked OK on
the Gateway. However, this was the last in a string of " improvements" I
had made, each of which used a bit more power than the last.
Now for a bit of clarifiaction: When I say that my Gateway would not boot,
I mean that it would not ven do all the BIOS checks, also called POST. You
know, that black screen with white characters that flies by early in the
boot process. In fact, it did not even get far enough to check the floppy
drive, from whihc I could have booted to DOS. And, it certainly nver made
it anywhere near recognizing that I had a hard drive to show an XP log-in
screen.
If you get up to some level of XP, such as the screen that offers F8 for a
safe boot, then you are well past the BIOS checks. In fact, if offerred F8,
try it. If safe mode works, then some drive or drivers are likely
conflicting. Although it is hard to imagine bad ZIP-drivers resulting
anything but a non-workign ZIP drive.
Of course, do not boot with a disk in the ZIP drive. Some motherboards can
boot from a ZIP, and a non-system ZIP might stall things. Although, the
more likely response of the PC would be to try booting form some other
device, like the hard drive.
Whihc, brings up an interesting thought. The PC BIOS has, of ourse, been
set to boot from a class of hard drives. If the only hard drive is an
internal disk, this is unambiguous. However, with a ZIP attached, if is
theoretically possible that the BIOS is looking to boot from the ZIP, in
preference to the internal hard drive. A quick test of this theory would be
to insert a bootable floppy and see whether the PC uses that, since a floppy
is almost always on the list of boot devices. Repeat the test with a
bootable CD. If the floppy and/or CD boot the PC, with the ZIP connected,
then the power supply is NOT the problem, and the BIOS settings likely are.
If none of the above boots the PC, think about that power supply again. As
a test, try disconnecting te CD reader/burner and all external USB and
firewire devices and booting, but with the ZIP attached.
As for drivers, XP has built-in drivers for common IOMEGA products, so
installing the latest IOMEGAware is not necessary. my new home-made PC has
an internal ZIP-250, and I literally plugged it in, powered on, and in about
10 seconds it was ready to go. XP booted, found the hardware, loaded
drivers, etc.
