Emax

Hello. I am trying to hook up a blue Iomega Zip Drive 100 to the back of my emax 2. I had it hooked up years ago, and it worked fine. I ordered 3 new zip disks, and attempted to format them. The Emax 2 however is not recognising the zip drive, and gives me an error message of "Hardware Error" when I try to format the disk, Master option 5. Please let me know if you have any ideas of what I need to do. Do I need the Operating system installed on a floppy disk to make the formatting happen? Thank you for your help with this frustrating situation,

Tony