Using Toshiba XM3301B scsi cdrom on old MACs...help?

From: Pete Turnbull <pete_at_dunnington.u-net.com>
Date: Wed Nov 1 03:13:14 2000

On Oct 31, 22:07, Claude.W wrote:
>
> [ Attachment (multipart/alternative): 3891 bytes ]

(BTW, please don't post HTML to the list)

> Used a driver that sees cdrom drive (icon with scsi id for drive appears
=
> on os startup) as soon as iso9660 format cd is inserted, it reports that
=
> it cant read the disk, it reports the size of the data used up on disk =
> and asks if I wanna format it or eject it...

Probably the block size. The older Macs require the blocksize on the CDROM
to be set to 512 bytes, as do older Suns and SGIs (newer machines work with
normal 2048-byte blocks, and issue a SCSI command to reset the size). To
fix this requires some minor surgery on the drive. This works for XM3301
and XM3401, but not XM3601 or later, BTW. I believe it works for XM5401
but I can't be sure about others.

On the 3301/3401 PCB, there are two solder pads near the rear right corner.
 Each looks like two semicircles bridgeed together, and they might be
labelled 0 and 1 -- if not, 0 is the one nearest the edge of the PCB. The
default setting (for PCs) is for 2048-byte blocks. Cutting the bridge
between the two halfs of either or both pads gives you 512-byte blocks; the
resulting three possibilities are supposed to be for different systems:

     open, open Sun bootable
     open, shorted SGI bootable
    shorted, open generic 512-byte
    shorted, shorted normal 2048-byte (default)

I've fitted a DIP switch to all my old Toshibas, so I can move them between
systems fairly easily.

-- 
Pete						Peter Turnbull
						Dept. of Computer Science
						University of York
Received on Wed Nov 01 2000 - 03:13:14 GMT

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