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

From: Bill Layer <b.layer_at_vikingelectronics.com>
Date: Wed Nov 1 09:10:33 2000

Hi Claude,

>Trying to use these on old compact MACs and MAC IIs using Mac OS 7.5.5

Heh. You have come up against a great MacOS / hardware annoyance.

First thing you need to know, is that support for non-Apple CD-ROM drives
is (criminally?) poor in versions of MacOS prior to 7.6; things seemed to
get a little better after the introduction of 7.6. Your problems are very
typical, so don't feel too badly. If you were using a "Genuine Apple" CD
drive, (with blessed firmware) this would all be easier. This is very
similar to the situation with the "Apple HD/SC Setup", which also handily
ignores hard drives with non-Apple firmware. This further supports my
assertion that we are all quite lucky that it's Bill Gates, and not Steve
Jobs who is the de-facto dictator of the micro computing world - but I digress.

Have you tried an HFS CD-ROM in the XM3301 drive? I suspect you will find
that the driver will mount an HFS CD - support for ISO9660 filesystems was
another weak point in this era, for both Apple and non-Apple drives. On the
other hand, I have had two of the NEC Multi-Spin (3X and 6X) drives, which
perfectly handle both HFS and ISO9660 using the proprietary NEC driver
(which incidentally, does not see drives from other manufacturers). Also,
there is an excellent generic CD-ROM driver for Mac, known as "Sunrise CD"
which supports just about any CD drive, but it does NOT support the ISO9660
filesystem.

It's clear from your experiment with the Pioneer drive, that neither the OS
nor the hardware is broken - I am laying this one at the feet of Apple, who
seem to have made a conscious effort to exclude third party hardware from
the Mac realm, with some measure of success. My suggestions: get a Genuine
Apple CD drive, use a third-party drive with a working proprietary driver
(such as Pioneer or NEC) upgrade to OS 7.6 or later, or just keep shooting
craps; YMMV.
Bill Layer
Sales Technician
<b.layer_at_vikingelectronics.com>

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Received on Wed Nov 01 2000 - 09:10:33 GMT

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