Maybe this will help

Sorry to hear about your troubles. Can’t help you with the demo disk, but that’s not your main worry now anyway. You need to be up and running again.

It doesn’t sound good for your drive. Fortunately, if indeed it's hosed, it’s not that difficult to replace. Back when Zips were evolving, a lot of SP-808 users swapped out the 100MB drives in their first-generation models for the 250MB drives used in the later EX units. As far as I know, the internal hardware is the same.

Here’s a URL that I bookmarked way way back in the long-ago:

http://www.angelfire.com/ca/wicket/tipsandtricks.htm

It gives how-to instructions, and specifies the type of internal Zip drive you’ll need as a replacement.

It also provides a simple way to power up in diagnostic mode so you can run a check on various components. I have a first-gen machine updated with the EX operating system, and it works the same. The Zip drive is option #9.

Good luck!