>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.
It's probably not the SCSI hardware on the drive that's causing the
problem, but the state of the driver descriptor map and the installed
driver. The Mac OS is particularly stupid about dealing with corrupt
drivers on a device, and it can be difficult to work around the
mounting problem and fix the drive. It's particularly difficult with
a Powerbook drive because the data connection is also the power
connection. I can remember having to disconnect the drive, boot the
Powerbook (with open case) from an external device, put it to sleep,
reconnect the drive, and then wake it up, just to avoid having a
corrupt driver loaded at boot time (and the resultant hang) so I
could work with it and fix the problem. Since you seem to be able to
boot from another drive while the 80MB is attached this may not be a
problem for you, but you may need to boot with
command-option-shift-delete to force the Duo to ignore the driver on
the internal disk.
As you can tell I've gotten drives into a state similar to what you
describe in the past. ;) One way you can possibly fix the problem is
to manually edit the partition map and driver partition with Norton
Disk Editor. You need to use a little trick of the editor program
where you rescan the SCSI bus, hold down command-shift (or something
like that) while popping up the device list, and then open the raw
SCSI device (instead of the Mac volume). Then you can go in and zero
the entire partition map (the first few blocks on the disk) and
perhaps the driver partition for good measure. Then shutdown and
restart, and you may find the formatting tools can work with the disk
again.
It's also possible that the drive's mode page settings (a small
reserved area on the disk) have gotten haywire, which could appear as
a hardware problem. Those are generally set to a known state by Mac
formatting tools when they install a driver, but you can also set
them manually or to an "optimal" state with a tool like FWB Configure
or Charismac Powercontrol (be aware that it's optimal for each
company's respective driver, but it's unlikely to make much
difference on an old drive like that one).
--
Marc Sira | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
"If you can't play with words, what good are they?"
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