on 28.07.2002 18:22, Will S at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Many of the 8x cdrom players will not boot
> anything but the Umax system disk.
> Not using FWB to format the hard drive was likely the reason your
> problems ended ;-) In fairness to FWB if you were willing to spend
> money and upgrade with nearly every OS change you could still use it.
> In the case of 9.04 not only did you have to spend money you had to
> wait nearly a year for the upgrade
I'd like to share some experiences that may shed some light, or just muddy
the waters, concerning the above. It's going to ramble a bit, so I thought
it best to remove it from the other thread.
FWIW, I have been a staunch supporter of FWB products since 1996. At the
time it certainly was the best way to avoid driver conflicts: initialise
every thing including my ejectables with HDT, control the CD reader with
CDT.
Soon after I got my J700 [I now use two S900s besides], and not knowing that
I couldn't ;-) I immediately wiped the HD with HDT, installed OS 8.1, and
used CDT to drive the reader, all retail versions which I already owned.
Everything was fine until I needed to mount a cartridge from someone else
who had not formatted their Zip or SyJet with HDT. Then all hell broke
loose. At first I thought it was Iomega's fault, since Zip disks seemed the
worst offenders. Then I noticed that the Iomega drivers were apparently so
benign as to able to be loaded from a bootable CD-ROM. Reflecting on this,
It seemed as if FWB was willing to play nice just as long as nobody else was
in the yard. Also, after some bench testing--using HDT, BTW--I discovered
there was little to no performance advantage. In fact, in some categories,
without tweaking ADS performed better than HDT.
A near-death experience with Seven-Dust convinced me of the value of backing
up to locked volumes such as CDRs, so I got a burner and quickly discovered
what a bother CDT is/was. It was then I recalled that early in the boot
sequence the computer will try to load every driver that's written to every
disk, since OF can't find a System Folder until it can control the disk, and
sure enough, leaving a bootable version of the Mac OS retail CD-ROM in the
reader's tray [CR-506, also verified with CR-507 and 508] at startup loaded
the Apple CD/DVD driver just fine. [BTW, this tactic has worked with SCSI
readers as old as a mediaVision 2X as well as Yamaha and PlexWriter SCSI
burners]
So at this point in the story, stability being more productive than flat out
speed, there are only Apple drivers on the hard drives, a work around is in
effect so that Apple drivers are loaded for the CD reader, and I have not so
much as mounted, let alone booted from the UMAX system CD-ROM for several
years.
After backing up and before converting to HFS+, I thought I'd take a look at
that CD and see what I was missing. And just for nostalgia's sake I booted
into System 7.6 with it. So far so good. Then I verify that my HD is
selected in the Startup Disk control panel and restart.
Flashing question mark.
Try zapping PRAM, no go.
Reboot into 7.6 from the CD and consider my options.
Shut down, insert newly created bootable CD with a small arsenal of
utilities I made [for combatting viruses from a locked disk ;-) ] and after
a bit of stuttering, get it to boot. After a number of blind attempts and
restarts, what finally worked was to update the drivers on the HDs, then zap
PRAM [actually I used TTP to restore it] and I was back in business.
Confident [cocky?] that I could recover from anything, I tried booting from
the Umax CD again with the exact same result. Fortunately, the same remedy,
arrived at much more quickly this time, proved effective.
At this point, having tested my luck and not wishing to push it, I have not
tried a third time since ;-)
This would seem to me that something about that CD was affecting both the
computer's PRAM as well as all the driver partitions of devices connected to
it. If I'm not mistaken, that would be rather aggressive. Was it designed
that way to prohibit conflicts with Apple, or competition with FWB?
As always, this is OMM, YMMV.
BTW, I continue to update HDT [currently at 4.5]; this aggressive tendency
and other useful utilities in it have saved my sorry butt any number of
times when trying to recover data from an HD on its last spindle.
Peace,
paul
--
Paul F. Henegan
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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