Mike wrote:[snip]
> How do we know what version of Drive Update to use? Does a new driveneed the newest driver available or are we better off sticking with a version more suited to our OS, for instance, if you still use 8.6?
You can use the Apple drive formatting software that came with your OS for any Apple supported drives, or the third party drive formatting programs for non-Apple supported drives.
Start by trying the newest version of Apple's Drive Setup that you can get your hands on. The latest is 2.0.7, which comes with OS 9.x, but works great with OS 8.1 thru 8.6 also.
If Drive Setup won't talk to the disk, then try a 3rd party formatter, such as FWB's Hard Disk ToolKit etc.
Formatting removes all old formatting and data and replaces it with your new data, so it doesn't matter what was on the drive.
A low level format operation does this.
A high level format simply verifies the partition map, updates the driver partition, etc.
The older OS will read formating done with newer software as long as the formatting type is supported. (I.E. HFS is readable by any OS, but HFS+ was not readable by some of the older OS versions. I believe the cutoff was somewhere back in the OS 7 range, about the7.5.5/7.6.1 era.)
The Mac OS Extended Heirarchical File System (HFS+), was introduced in January 1998 as part of Mac OS 8.1 (codenamed "Bride of Buster"). :)
> If you are experiencing HD problems (not mounting or bootingcorrectly, etc.), how can you tell if it is driver related? I would> guess they can get corrupted just like the rest of your data?
The driver is stashed in a read-only partition on the hard drive. Since it is accessed ONLY when the drive is first touched by the OS, it is very very very very very very rare that it gets corrupted. It is more likely the problem is a corrupted pointer in the drive's partition map.
Disk First Aid or Norton Utilities can fix some of these corruptions. But often partition map corruptions mean that your disk's volumes are lost.
> Seems to me you need a good driver to get your drive to mount correctly but > you cannot update or replace (reload?) a driver UNLESS your drive is > mounted. Am I wrong about this apparent catch 22?
Yer wrong. :) Shoving a new driver into its partition has nothing to do with the other partitions (volumes) that may be present on a hard drive. In fact, to do such an operation you actually need to DISMOUNT the volumes first.
- Dan.
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