9500 - SCSI LaCie CD-Rom drive and/or burner

[superpantoufle]

Hi all,

Funny, it seems there's a lot of topics about the 9500 these days. Actually I just "liberated" one of those beasts for myself two days ago. I got it pretty cheap and it came with a 300 MHz G3 card and a LaCie SCSI CD burner but the poor guy was indeed in an awful state. Dirty as hell outside and inside, it wouldn't boot at first, and the back panel nearly disintegrated itself when I opened the case.

Well, long story short it took me quite some time to clean it and test the Ram, the drives and the cards, but it's up and running, only with a dead internal CD drive. But the external LaCie drive allowed me to boot from a CD, format the hard drives and install a clean Mac OS 9. Everything fine!

But today I thought I'd try to install OS X on it using XPostFacto, just because I can… And the damn LaCie drive won't mount any CD any more! It won't boot from the CD it used to install OS 9 just hours ago either. I tried another external Cd drive I had in stock with no luck. The Apple CD/DVD extension is installed; SCSIProbe can see the drive but fails to mount any CD. I guess I'm missing something, but can't figure out what. I certainly don't have any driver for the LaCie, but it read CDs hours ago without a driver either…

Any idea?

I guess the issue is more related to software or to the external SCSI drives, but anyway. Sorry if I posted in the wrong place.

 

[equill]

The 9500 has separate internal ('fast') and external ('slow') SCSI controllers and buses. Is it possible that you (even unwittingly) changed termination or ID on the LaCie drive after successful use of it? Is it a d2 CD-ROM? Whether or no, check that the term on slide-switch is depressed if the LaCie is the last or only device in the external chain, and raised if the LaCie is not last. SCSI ID=3 for CD-ROMs in most later Macs, and that keeps it away from HDDs at ID=0, 1 or 2.

As a potential clincher that the drive is still A1, how does it behave with, say, the Colour Classic and HFS-formatted CDs? Another consideration is that Mac OS X CDs are formatted HFS+, as befits the New World order, and your existing CD-ROM driver may know nowt about such new-fangled stuff, regardless of what OS 9 knows. Continuing that line, what does the Beige G3 do with an HFS or HFS+ CD in the LaCie? LaCie provided Silverlining as an alternative to HD SC Setup or Drive Setup, the version depending on the OS/System on the Mac. With OS 9, LaCie 6.5.1 would be appropriate if you can lay hands on it, and offers a far more informative and supportive setup for HDDs and optical drives (whether SCSI, USB or FireWire).

de

 

[superpantoufle]

Thanks equill!

Sorry I haven't given any feedback earlier. I don't know what happened for sure, but my CD eventually mounted fine. It's most certainly a termination issue, but it seems to work randomly with that drive and that cable.

 

[equill]

Good that you succeeded, and the cable may have been the villain, in conformity with all that is known (feared?) about SCSI Voodoo. I have rarely known a SCSI problem to be fixed completely by a change of cable, but it has happened. Because I was able to do so, I acquired LaCie cables with each of my (5) LaCie d2 readers/burners, and they work. Apple-branded cables do so too, but the skinnier a (third-party) cable, the skinnier can be your chance of its universal suitability.

de