on 4/23/01 9:07 AM, Greg at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
>> As for messing around where you oughtn't, Mac users do tend in the
>> habit of reformatting drives WAY too often. It's almost never
>> necessary to do a low-level format of a drive, and barely ever
>> necessary even to erase a filesystem. It's just one of those
>> wave-a-chicken cures that people resort to, like rebuilding the
>> Desktop database or zapping the PRAM without really checking out what
>> the problem is. If I wanted to reformat and reinstall to fix every
>> problem I'd be running Windows. ;) I do understand why you wanted to
>> do this with a drive you'd bought used, but I wouldn't have bothered
>> (or if I did I'd be sure to use the FWB tool and keep the grown
>> defect list).
>>
>> --
>> Marc Sira
>
> Thanks Marc for the very useful and informative explanation. My problem
> at this point is that the duo hangs (endlessly spinning cursor) whenever
> the SCSI bus is scanned looking for the drive. I CAN start the duo in
> the dock (with the dock's drive) but the new drive won't mount (show up
> on desktop). Then I can use FWB Toolkit "WorldControl" to STOP the drive
> from spinning (I can hear this) and to START it spinning. But if I use
> HDSC setup or FWB Toolkit's HD Primer or "SuperSpot" (HD formatter) the
> computer hangs (as mentioned above) as soon as any of these programs
> scans the SCSI bus looking for the available drives.
>
> After rebooting again, I can STOP the drive with FWB's WorldControl,
> then use "Mt. Everything" and it sees the drive but says it's NOT READY
> (presumable because it is stopped). Then I tell Mt. Everything to use
> it's own driver, NOT the disks driver. Then I click on MOUNT and the
> drive spins up but then the computer hangs.
>
> It just seems that whenever the computer tries to scan the SCSI bus of
> this little 80M drive it goes into a endless loop or a "wait" state or
> something. The cursor has a spinning ball or wristwatch (depending on
> the program being used) which the mouse will still move, but nothing
> happens. No head rattling (seeking motions) of either the drive in
> question or the drive that is running the machine. It requires a
> command-option-esc to Force Quit and then the computer freezes and
> requires a REstart. It just seems that the computer is looking for
> something to happen on the drive that never happens, i.e. waiting for a
> pin to go high or low so it can begin.
>
> This little 80 meg HD is not terribly valuable even if it did work, but
> it is the third drive I have messed with (over many months) that seems
> to work at first but after my efforts to reformat, eventually gets to
> the point it can't even be mounted, to do anything at all with.
>
> What are the "magic words" or keystrokes etc. that will make the little
> duo "lay down the law" and force this drive to listen up? ;-) or
> something like that!
>
The only time I ever encountered a drive that behaved like that was when I
ordered an 18.2 GB SCSI (Fujitsu) from OWC. I put it into a 7600 that I'd
just bought and it seemed to work fine, but if I tried to transfer a file
bigger than the drive's hardware cache, the drive would hang. Silverlining
will actually test this. OWC swapped me another one. And that one failed.
They also said that they tested the first one and couldn't find a thing
wrong with it! They ended up giving me a Seagate that works just fine. The
second Fujitsu also tested just fine when they got it back. Actually, it
had tested just fine when they checked it before sending it. Since I've
never heard anything but high praise for OWC's support, I can only assume
that there's something slightly funky with the internal SCSI hardware on my
7600.
Anyway, this is a long-winded way of saying that *sometimes* you really can
have a hardware problem with a drive. Especially on as old as an 80 MB
drive. If you've checked the connections and cable (perhaps by trying a
different drive), then if formatting software chokes on the drive, then it
isn't overkill to assume a hardware problem.
- Eric.
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