Depending on the type of Iomega Zip drive you have, you can enable it by configuring a virtual device to connect with it: either a generic SCSI device, a parallel port device, or a USB device.
Note: When configuring an Iomega Zip drive as a parallel port device, be aware that on a Windows 9x guest operating system you need to obtain new drivers. Older drivers for the Iomega Zip drive may cause the guest operating system to lock up intermittently at boot time or during installation of the operating system. The newest Iomega drivers work reliably in tests conducted by VMware. They are available at: http://www.iomega.com.
Virtual machines do not support EIDE ATAPI Iomega Zip drives. An Iomega Zip drive that uses an EIDE ATAPI interface cannot be used within a VMware GSX Server virtual machine. IDE disk drives within a virtual machine do not support ATAPI (although the virtual machine IDE CD-ROM drives do). Iomega EIDE ATAPI Zip drives can continue to be used on the host operating system and may contain VMware GSX Server virtual disks.
However, an EIDE ATAPI Iomega Zip drive runs in compatibility mode on dual-boot Windows 95/98 configurations. If you boot Windows 95 or Windows 98 from a raw disk (dual-boot situation) and configure your EIDE ATAPI Zip drive as an available device when Windows is running under VMware GSX Server as a guest operating system, the Iomega drivers/software runs in compatibility mode (rather than 32 bit mode) after that, even when you are running Windows natively.
This happens because Windows 95 and Windows 98 do not actually insulate the different hardware profiles (the native and guest versions) from each other. VMware GSX Server does not support IDE Zip drives. Thus, when the drive is accessed within VMware GSX Server, no IDE driver is present and Windows falls back to DOS compatibility mode, hoping that a legacy DOS driver is running.
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