Yo compacters everywhere, On Flicker's thread here, our Flicker Flacker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> sez:
>My trouble will be how do I completely >remove from the EZ135 cartridge(s) that will be for Mac Plus the >existing drivers that are not working. Well, lemme see. What I do is: with the disk I want to put the new driver on, I put the disk into the SyQuest drive, spin it up 'til the light on the drive goes green, and hope it mounts. If it does, I launch the formatter utility poking those buttons that gets the formatting underway along with all of those warnings about what I am doing is going to destroy every little thing on the disk. If the disk is sound, all of this formatting happens, the disk remounts, and a check with Get Info confirms a new driver. Sometimes, the disk won't mount for any of several reasons they choose not to mount. So I launch SCSI Probe clicking on the mount button. Usually it does. Some people here use other mounting tools many having success with something called Lido 7.5.6 which can be found from the FAQ. I read that you are starting up your Plus with the disk already in your SyQuest and I assume up to speed with a green light showing. It is at this point that I understand you start your Plus and it goes Sad Mac on you. Hmmm... Yup. Have seen this on SEs and other Macs with a SyQuest too. I even have a disk I use to dependably demonstarate this to others. As a starting point, I assume your Plus is indeed a good working Plus as is your boot floppy or whatever you boot from is in known good shape. Further, I assume you have no SCSI address conflict and your SCSI chain is properly terminated. We want to be sure that we are looking only at a SyQuest drive, disk, or driver problem. In short, does this Mac work okay without the SyQuest? And, again, does the SyQuest drive and disk work on another Mac ok? I assume your Plus is booting and working from a "regular" boot floppy disk. At 27k, you might want to put SCSI Probe on your boot floppy and try it this way: Have your SyQuest connected and turned on but with no disk installed. Boot from your boot floppy or other known good startup drive of choice. If you get this far, it is likely your SyQuest disk and not your drive that is the problem. Open the control panel selecting SCSI Probe. It should see the drive even with no disk installed. Click on Mount just for the hell of it. This would leave me happy that, again, your disk is the problem. Now insert the disk and spin it up. I would expect a freeze about here. If so, repeat all of this trying another known to be good SyQuest disk. If it does not freeze, launch SCSI Probe and see if it finds your disk this time. Crash city at this point suggests your disk is bad and gonna stay bad. Your hope at this point is to try Lido or another mounter utility in the forlorn hope that a different wrench will turn this difficult nut. If you find SCSI Probe or another mounter mounts your disk, FORMAT IT NOW! Your ancient Silverling, Silverlining lite, FWB, and likely other formatters will do it. An older Silverlining or Silverlining lite will certainly do it-these were the formatting utilities on every SyQuest 135 disk ever made. FWB drivers work also. I will not argue formatters or drivers. On my SyQuest 135 disks, I use FWB because it works well for me. If any aspect of your SyQuest is working at this point, the rest should become obvious. If still you have nothing but a Sad Mac or crash city, start looking more generic than your SyQuest. Does any external SCSI device work with your Plus? Try an external hard drive, a CD-ROM, anything SCSI that will work with a Plus and for which you have set up your startup disk to support. If these work, we are back to your SyQuest. On another Mac, confirm that your SyQuest components; drive, disk, SCSI cable, and terminator actually work. If this SyQuest drive and disk are working on another Mac, reformat the disk with your formatter of choice on this other Mac. Then haul the drive and disk back to the Plus and try again. A few little things: When formatting a problem disk, I've had success by first performing a "quick format" or whatever your formatter may call it followed by reformatting a second time with a "low level format" or whatever your formatter calls its deep kidney surgery version of formatting. Two steps have gotten me where one step could not. Second; Try rebuilding the desktop of the recalcitrant disk. Use TechTool, or Apple's Command + Option keys at startup if that is all you have. Yes, this can help. Obviously, this isn't gonna get you passed no Sad Mac. But if you try it with a disk inserted after starting up... Third; with this SyQuest drive and disk SCSI'd up to an 030 or better Mac, try running Diskwarrior on it. Amazing what that tool fixes. Fourth; I've oft been told that the Plus had a very "loose" implementation of the SCSI protocol. Whatever is meant by loose, I've been told not to expect everything SCSI to work with a Plus. Fifth; Now and again I am told that SyQuest 135 disks have a higher than average failure rate-the disks, not the drive. This hasn't been my experience yet. I like these SyQuest 135s better than Zip 100s. To each their own. A difficulty many of us face here is that we don't have all of this stuff close at hand. This is a good reason to belong to a Mac User's Group where you are best likely able to beg, borrow, or steal, er, buy this stuff. MUG people with their latest and greatest G-Whiz Macs are always happy to part their ancient Mac stuff to someone who will use it. Bill -- Compact Macs is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/>. 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