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Bernoulli Drive fixes, ?any experiences anyone

OleLila

Well-known member
I had a great experince  with a SCSI Sony magneto optical drive and decided to keep checking out older scsi removable media devices. Found a Jaz drive and it is, thus far, infinitely better than the zip. I found a couple of bernoulli 150 MB external SCSI drives and they both turn on, the scsi software correctly identifies them, but does not acknowledge media as being present. One of them stated to format, but then stopped working. They both seem to be broken in the same way, they turn on, scsi probe knows they are Bernoulli and sees them, but when I put the media in, they spin then there is a fairly solid surge which fits with a magnetically driven read her, but I don't think it ever engages, its like they get stuck or hit something. You can take them apart and remove a circuitboard, but can really not get to the magnets or head/mechansm without some pretty aggressive disassembly...like maybe heating up some magnetic shielding and peeling it off. Maybe I'll ave to sacrifice one of them.

 

jessenator

Well-known member
You might need a 3rd party utility to format them.
Will tools like Lido or Anubis properly handle Bernoulli media? Just wondering what utilities would be best suited. As the soon-to-be-owner of a Bernoulli box, I'm also interested here.

 

Unknown_K

Well-known member
I think they would. To be honest I have a couple 90MB? external Bernoulli drives with some media but have not used them yet. I try and snag any external SCSI drive types I can for the collection.

 

jessenator

Well-known member
I'm having vague recollections about this… Might be worthy of a series of tests. Back in '00 or so I got a syquest and a bernoulli drive and I recall one worked fine with whatever SCSI utility I had, but not the other.

 

Unknown_K

Well-known member
I just looked at one of my external Bernoulli drives and it is a Iomega 150 Multidisk model. The cool think about it is it has centronics connector on the back and has a switch that you set to SCSI (has a SCSI ID selector ) and the optional IOMEGA Parallel Port so you can connect it to a standard PC (probably much slower).

 

OleLila

Well-known member
The one that started to format was recognized by system 9.1 with "This disk in unrecognizable, do you want to format?", then stopped during the process. I've tried Lido, PLI formatter, SCSI director, Bluedisk manager and Silver lining. The switch is set to SCSI.

 
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Cory5412

Daring Pioneer of the Future
Staff member
Iomega had its own Bernoulli disk formatting utility. I've tried it on a few of my own systems with a 230-meg drive and disks, some of the disks were still sealed even, and haven't gotten very far, myself.

I've gotten my unit to do self tests with the bernoulli management/formatting tool, I forget if that was on my 840 or my PB1400, but either the drive or the cartridges came back bad, but: inconsistently.

I need to pull all that stuff out again and take a look. More recently, I tried again on my PM6200 but still couldn't get it working there, either. I'm kind of hoping it's just that the driver was never very PPC compatible and it'll all come right up on my 840, but we'll see.

 

jessenator

Well-known member
Iomega had its own Bernoulli disk formatting utility. I've tried it…
Is that utility up on vTools?

I noticed this, but it might be nothing more than hearsay: this MacintoshGarden uploader's comment that the splash screen hints at a compatibility with the (later) Bernoulli boxes is intriguing. Talking specifically about the first download, the non-specific "Tools™" image. I'm going to test a number of drivers/utilities and see once mine get here. It's a post-powerPC, so I'd assume it's a fat binary ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

 
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Cory5412

Daring Pioneer of the Future
Staff member
I feel called out in the most hilarious way. You're right. I need to check.

I got it off of another site, MacGUI Archive IIRC. If it's on vtools, it might be in my private folder, so I'll put it in public.

 

jessenator

Well-known member
I feel called out in the most hilarious way.
BijkZO7.jpg.c8dcd1a34beff2b57ff7ad06f044988c.jpg


;)  FR, no calling out intended. I'd definitely like to try out that utility however.

 

jessenator

Well-known member
Here's a teardown for those not yet willing to do it on their own… I wonder if there are bad solenoids. 



 

OleLila

Well-known member
I've tried Lido and Blue disk manager on a plus  and G3...same results, finds the drive, but does not acknowledge the presence of a disk (no media inserted). 

He stops when he got down to the part that exposes the heads....I thought if you could clean the heads after 35 years it would be a good starting point but I don't see any way to get to them without removing that shielding, unless you want to find and spend excessive amounts on a cleaning cartridge. I guess I might take it apart again and clean any area he points to and says "optical sensor". The way it feels, there are bearings that move the head assembly, maybe these are bad, but again, a big disassembly to expose. I imagine I'm bound to sacrifice one of them to see the coils and head assembly.

 

Cory5412

Daring Pioneer of the Future
Staff member
For reference, here is the driver and utility I used: https://www.macgui.com/downloads/?file_id=23588 

Mine can recognize the media, but fails to actually format it. I've had this happen with pre-used media as well as still sealed media.

My understanding is that you really aren't supposed to partition and low level format the media yourself. That's a factory kind of thing, and so if I'm remembering right, there's scenarios where if a piece of media has been wiped using something like a tape degausser, a bernoulli cartridge is just going to be totally dead from that.

Not 100% on that because I haven't really perused a real bernoulli manual, but, from my perspective since I'd only tried two disks that was something to consider as an option.

Given the mode of operation for bernoulli drives, they allegedly shouldn't need cleaning, but that doesn't mean there's not something else in there.

I'll see if I can get my source on some of this stuff in here to either give me ideas or join up here and post some thoughts. I believe he has/had a bernoulli, but I don't know if he used it on a Mac.

 

Unknown_K

Well-known member
I didn't know getting these running was problematic so I will fire one up this week and see how it goes.

 

Unknown_K

Well-known member
Did a quick setup test with my init and either the IIsi system could not see it or the system did not boot (could not find my system HD).

Will mess around with it more this weekend probably.

 

jessenator

Well-known member
I tried (manual installation) of v4.x iomega driver from Macintosh Garden) and it's X'd out on startup and I get a warning dialog at Finder launch saying it couldn't find an Iomega Drive. The installer won't run, rightly, because there's no Zip drive, but I thought that even with a manual driver install something would work. No dice.

I can't download the Bernoulli driver from VintageApple.org, as it's linking to iomega's old FTP site*. 

I did, however, successfully get it to work with the link Cory provided above. Works with my PowerWave running System 7.6.1 just fine, even the "Workshop" utility for formatting and scanning disks.

I did some searching on the wayback machine and there were other, newer versions of drivers, specifically for the Bernoulli, up to v. 5.0.x, but unfortunately I don't know how/don't think there's provision for wayback to access FTP. *There were several other mirrors as well, but none of them worked, sadly. 

 

CC_333

Well-known member
I can't download the Bernoulli driver from VintageApple.org, as it's linking to iomega's old FTP site*
This is a long shot, and you may have already tried, but you can search the Wayback Machine for old FTP sites too.

There's several archives of both Apple's and Microsoft's FTP sites, for example. Not sure if there's more.

c

 
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jessenator

Well-known member
If only these mirrors had been imaged :/  https://web.archive.org/web/19970711132306/http://www.iomega.com/support/software/ftpmac501.html

that v.5.0.1 one could speculate is the last version of the software that supported the Bernoulli

Interestingly, the previous image of that page shows v.4.3 for Zip, but the Bernoulli driver is still v.3.53, still accessible from MacGUI, so there never was a v.4.3 for Bernoulli it would seem.

This is a long shot, and you may have already tried, but you can search the Wayback Machine for old FTP sites too.
sigh, dangit, another dead end. https://web.archive.org/web/19981212014111/ftp://ftp.iomega.com/

English 404s and captures past that date 401 error. I tried a couple logical directories but no luck.

Might be that someone, somewhere out there has this "Mac501.hqx" archive...

 
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