NeXT MO disks

From: Mark <mark_k_at_iname.com>
Date: Tue Mar 6 15:05:24 2001

On Mon, 5 Mar 2001 Jeff Hellige wrote:
> I actually found a couple of Sony EDM-1DA1 MO disks with
>512-byte sectors and are formatted out to approximately 281meg/side.
>Connected to 3 different Mac's, they will all read the disks fine but
>they all error out when I attempt to reformat the disks, either using
>the Pinnacle-supplied software or using FWB HDtoolbox. This version
>of HDtoolbox states that it supports this drive too. The drive acts
>like thier's a SCSI-bus problem at times but changing terminators and
>such have had no effect on it.

Hmm. What error messages does the software give when you try to format the
disks? Can you successfully write data to the already-formatted disks?

Try disabling blind reads and writes and enabling write verification, if
possible (the Pinnacle software has per-partition options for that). Also, if
you want to try formatting using Hard Disk Toolbox (say), don't power up the
Mac with a Pinnacle-formatted disk in the drive. Insert the disk after
booting; that way, the FWB driver will be used to access the disk, not
whatever driver happens to be on the disk at the moment.

Using a SCSI utility/diagnostic program, see how many sectors are in the
primary and secondary defect lists. If there are many more in the secondary,
that suggests that the drive lens and/or disk surface may be dirty.

Cleaning the disk surface is easy (remember, with disk side A up, the surface
for side A is underneath), so you may as well try that before attempting to
open the drive. If you don't want to buy a purpose-designed disk cleaning kit
you can use a lint-free cloth. Breathe on the disk and carefully wipe
radially, rotate the disk slightly and repeat. Preferably wear some plastic
gloves to prevent skin oils from touching the disk.


For what it's worth, the Pinnacle Micro Mac driver is one of the few Mac SCSI
packages that works on my Amiga with the ShapeShifter Mac emulator (even with
ShapeShifter's I-can't-believe-the-bugs-in-that SCSI emulation).


-- Mark
Received on Tue Mar 06 2001 - 15:05:24 GMT