On Friday, March 7, 2003, at 04:43 PM, palkasoft wrote: > Uh oh... > > I deleted the first post of this email because it didn't seem to really > concern me and I wanted to keep my inbox clean. > > However its beginning to sound like it might explain my last week of > terror between my Quadra 800 and PowerBook 190 which has a 5gb IDE hard > drive in it. > > Ive been spending days trying to get MacOS 8.1 installed on the > PowerBook > through SCSI disk mode. It has resulted in the complete loss of > hundreds > of files on the Quadra 800, including ones that make it boot, which it > ceased to, as well as programs and documents. All of the losses are > completely random (like the entire contents of the fonts folder, a > program called weather mac, and the finder file for example). I > followed > all of the strict SCSI disk mode rules, but it still did it. One of my > friends also mentioned he thought it was strange how the powerbook was > the one that booted with all of the drives, as if though the Quadra was > going into SCSI disk mode and not the powerbook. > > Does this article have anything to do with my above problem? If it > does, > can somebody repost the link?
No. The link posted talks about I/O errors on the powerbook connected as disk mode. Moreover, the error only occurs when you try to read or write *beyond* the 4GB limit. I know this because as I read the link this morning. I was *successfully* installing OS 8.6 on a Powerbook 5300 with a 4.5 gb drive in it via SCSI disk mode. Go figure. Here is the tech note on Apple's developer site:<http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn/tn1116.html> Here is the relevant bits: "This problem only affects PowerBooks prior to the PowerBook 3400 (introduced in February 1997) with replacement ATA drives. There is a bug in the SCSI disk mode code of the PowerBook 5300 family, the PowerBook 2300c, the PowerBook 1400 family and the PowerBook 190 family. To get the size of the ATA HD in these machines, the SCSI disk mode code gets two 16-bit values from the ATA driver that contain the size of the device in 512-byte blocks. The math to combine these two values was sign-extending the lower-16 bits, and could incorrectly calculate the size of the device (in other words, the size was always smaller than it should be). The symptom was that you would get I/O errors at the end of the last volume on the device when the SCSI disk mode code would think you were trying to access blocks off the end of the device. The last 16 megabytes of the drive will report I/O errors when you try to access that data area. " Your problem (which you describe as SCSI disk mode in reverse), is not possible. The Quadra can not work in that fashion. I truly suspect something else was happening, as if somehow the quadra's scsi bus was being taken over by the powerbook. Are you positive it was a SCSI disk mode cable (all pins in the square connector) as opposed to a normal scsi connector ( one corner pin missing)? (I cannot conceive of any other way you would see the quadra's drive on the desktop of the powerbook if the scsi ports were the only connection, and even then I not sure it's even possible...) though that could surely cause all sorts of havok if two controllers were trying to look at and write to a drive at the same time... > -- "Wherever you go, there you are." - B. Banzai, Ph.D. Bruce Johnson -- PowerBooks is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Enter To Win A | -- Canon PowerShot Digital Cameras start at $299 | Free iBook! | Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> PowerBooks list info: <http://lowendmac.com/lists/powerbooks.shtml> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/powerbooks%40mail.maclaunch.com/> Using a Mac? Free email & more at Applelinks! http://www.applelinks.com
