SCSI or Voodoo? (also, NeXT hd travails)

From: Mark Tapley <mtapley_at_swri.edu>
Date: Mon Jun 4 10:24:28 2001

>From: jpero_at_sympatico.ca
>> From: Geoff Reed <geoffr_at_zipcon.net>
>>....
>> you'll need to use FWB or another 3rd party HD toolkit, apple's HD
>> formatter won't work with that drive.
>>
>...
>Begin searching for the HD SC 7.3.5 formatter patch info, it will
>detail how to manually patch it with free editor also from apple too.
>The mod is only a hex and easy to find to mod on.
>...
>Wizard

The URL's I found on http://euronet.nl/users/ernstoud/patch.html were a
little out of date - but starting with ftp.apple.com and using
"English-NorthAmerican" instead of "US" I got there. There may be other
pointers. Have not tried out the patched version yet.

I love this list. I actually needed this info today - and here it is!
Thanks, Wizard!

NeXT problem - got an IBM DPES-31080 off of ebay (mea culpa, perhaps I
deserve the consequences). I can hook it up and it is recognized by the
NeXT SCSI bus [1] as a "COMPAQPCDPES31080", so it's not totally dead.
Unfortunately the first thing I did to it was run sdform. Sdform completed
normally, didn't complain. Then tried to run "disk" to change the label and
put a boot block in. I can read the label and change what "disk" sees as
the label, but when I do that, or anything else, I get a lot of messsages
that say

sd1: incomplete disk transfer: bytes moved = 0x2000, resid = 0x2000, retry 1

I tried format from the "disk" interactive list. No complaints. Back to
write label, or init, or any of the other options - same error message.
Gave the drive to the local support desk - they "formatted" it no problems
on a WinNT machine. I have an email out to them to ask whether they
actually initialized it after that or not. Interestingly, they report the
DPES has a different label than what I put on it and what my copy of "disk"
still reports for it.

Next thing I'll do, barring any better suggestions, is pop it into a Power
Mac 8500 in a lab here and play with it using patched HD SC 7.3.5 (see
above).

Suggestions solicited and welcome. The drive is at home today, will be back
in the office with the tools tomorrow.
                                        - Mark

[1] But not always. It's not recognized, whether its active termination is
on or not, if it's the only drive on the SCSI chain. It is recognized in an
external case with one other drive and with one internal drive, and it's
recognized if it's on the internal bus with the other internal drive. Not
if it's internal alone. Have not tried it external alone.
Received on Mon Jun 04 2001 - 10:24:28 BST

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