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FWB NuBUS Jackhammer Incompatible with Fujitsu 2.3G MO Drive

trag

Well-known member
Have you tried more than one kind of media?

This is really grasping at straws, but I have a really vague recollection of there being some difference in behavior depending on whether the media has 512B per block (block, sector?) or whether it uses 1KB.

Don't the MO drives usually work fine without any special drivers installed? I mean, things like ejectability may be affected, but I remember my experience being, plug them in, boot up and they act like a removable media device.

It may depend on what low level driver one put on the media, i.e. what utility was used to initialize the disk.

Oh, have you tried different utilities to initialize the disk?

I think I have a copy of APS 4.7 around here somewhere...

I know I have a couple of Fujitsu CDs with their software, but I doubt it's later than you have, since they came with 640MB external drives. I really like those 640 external DynaMO drives. The cases are stylish.
 

olePigeon

Well-known member
The 640M, 1G, and 2.3G disks use 2048B sectors.

They work fine without any drivers, just like most cartridge systems. So long as the disk is inserted when you turn it on, it'll mount automatically. Otherwise you can just use a SCSI mounter of your choice (I use FWB Mounter, it seems to work better than SCSI Probe.)

I have tried probably 2 dozen different formatting utilities trying to get it to work. I got a 640 disk to work (sort of) when formatted with FWB, but it was really, really, really slow. So slow to the point of being unusable, and would eventually crash computer about 1/2 way through copying large amounts of data. However, I could not get FWB to format a 2.3G disk successfully. It would always crash. Drive 7 would work to format it, but I ran into the same issues as with just using the Fujitsu formatter. I thin LIDO worked as well for formatting, but same issue. Disks won't mount while the FWB card is installed.

128M and 230M disks seemed to format and work when formatted with FWB, but slower than if I were using the Fujitsu driver.

Keep in mind, the drive is not connected to the Jackhammer card. They're on the local BUS. So the Jackhammer is somehow interfering with the local BUS.

I think you mentioned that it may be treating it as one logical SCSI BUS? So I wonder if perhaps the Jackhammer card is indeed incompatible with the Fujtisu drive, and because of how it works as one logical BUS, it renders the local BUS incompatible as well.

@trag Do you think if the the SCSI Manager was patched in-ROM that it might make a difference? I tried using the system extension, but it didn't appear to do anything.
 

trag

Well-known member
What host machine are you testing on, again. SCSI Manager gets complicated because it's built into some stuff.

Quadra AVs and later (everything later is PPC) have SCSI Manager built into their ROM.

I **think** that the JackHammer card has a copy of SCSI Manager in it's on-board ROM.

And there is the loadable extension.

When there's more than one version, sometimes there can be conflicts, but not always. I have no idea how the System manages multiple attempts to load the same code.

But on a PPC machine or Quadra AV, you could attempt to load it up to three times. Once from host ROM, once from the JackHammer card and once if you have the extension installed.

And you only want to load it once.

Are you thinking of patching it into ROM using something like a ROMinator? It might make a difference on machines that don't already have it in ROM.

I encourage the experiment simply because if you can figure out how to patch an extension's functionality into ROM, that would be a great thing to be able to do to all the pre-AV machines with slots. But I don't have any way of knowing if it would solve your issue.

SCSI Manager could be a complete red herring.

I do know we had a brief visit from someone who seemed to have coded for Apple professionally, or similar experience at that level several years back, and in one discussion made it sound easy to patch SCSI Manager into a ROM -- like everyone just naturally knows how to do that.

Of course he didn't stick around long enough to provide detailed instructions. Sigh.
 

olePigeon

Well-known member
@trag Host machines is a Macintosh IIci.

DougG3 made me a ROM with the Daystar driver patched in. So he knows how, but it didn't feel right to ask him to do it for me. I dunno. I might just be out of luck.

I'm still hoping that the 2.3.6 driver might work, if we can ever track it down.
 

Franklinstein

Well-known member
Maybe turn it on after boot and use a mounter program for the disks?

Otherwise I don't have many suggestions here. MOs are awesome when they work but getting there can be a really frustrating experience. For some reason System 7 does NOT like to play nice with any of the 640MB MOs I try to use regardless of drive (various Fujitsu or Olympus), disk (Maxell, Fujitsu, Mitsubishi, Kyocera, etc), or software (SilverLining, FWB ToolKit, or B's Recorder), but OS 8 and later works fine with them and System 7 is good with any of the 230MB MOs. I haven't tried to use any Gigamos with classic Mac OS, mostly because I figure they'll be a hassle, at least in SCSI form, and also because I only have one SCSI version (1.3GB) and it's internal so that limits its usefulness as a transportable high-capacity storage medium.
 

olePigeon

Well-known member
My IIci is still out of commission so I haven't been able to test the 2.3.6 driver. However, I did read carefully through the ReadMe file for the 2.3.1 driver, and it states that the JackHammer is only compatible with 512 byte sector cartridges. It specifically states that it is not compatible with 1024b sector cartridges or larger. So that would explain why it doesn't work with anything above 640MB (they're all 2048b/sec.)

I did learn that the 540MB discs are still 512b/sector. I always thought it was kind of odd to have both 540MB and 640MB discs, but now it makes sense.
 

olePigeon

Well-known member
This is really grasping at straws, but I have a really vague recollection of there being some difference in behavior depending on whether the media has 512B per block (block, sector?) or whether it uses 1KB.

This is exactly the problem. :) Read back through this thread and you were spot on. Could have saved myself the trouble if I had thoroughly read the ReadMe file. The JackHammer is not compatible with cartridges that are larger than 512B/sector. The 640 and larger are all 2048B/sector. I'd have have to use 540MB or smaller, as the 540MB discs were the largest media to still use 512B. Or switch to 5.25" MO media, which are still 512B/sec for the 2.3GB discs (but the larger capacity discs are 1024 and 2048.)
 

trag

Well-known member
This is exactly the problem. :) Read back through this thread and you were spot on.
Thank you. I'm feeling very sleepy today -- probably oak pollen -- and that was a nice pick-me-up. It's always nice to have been right about something. :)
 

CC_333

Well-known member
I'm feeling very sleepy today -- probably oak pollen
I've been feeling quite lousy the past few days. i thought it was a cold or something other than covid, but then I looked up at the neighbor's sycamore trees and all the pollen they're spewing into our yard (said neighbor, of course, is upwind, so he gets almost none of it).

If anyone here knows what a sycamore is, you know how terrible their pollen is!

Has anyone tried to see if a work around for the 512B limitation is possible? Sorry if I seem dense....

c
 

MrFahrenheit

Well-known member
Has anyone tried to see if a work around for the 512B limitation is possible? Sorry if I seem dense....

I thought my A/UX 3.0.1 bootable MO disk was 1.3GB (hence 2048b, which apparently doesn't work with A/UX), but it turns out I used a 540MB disk (retaining 512b).

I wish I had a Jackhammer to test with. My IIfx would sing.
 

trag

Well-known member
@trag In your experience, would you hazard a guess if it's a hardware limitation or driver limitation?
I have no idea, but if I had to guess, I'd guess driver limitation. The hardware ought to be able to just sling the bits off the disk, I would think. Of course, there might be low level hardware functionality in how the sectors are read, but that just doesn't seem consistent with how most disk technology is done.

I think. Willing to find I'm wildly wrong, even in my total uncertainty....
 

trag

Well-known member
I have no idea, but if I had to guess, I'd guess driver limitation.

I think. Willing to find I'm wildly wrong, even in my total uncertainty....

I have rethought my guess a bit, seasoned with an old memory and now I'm leaning towards hardware -- or firmware.

I remembered an old (IIRC) Pinnacle Micro 5.25" drive which could operate on either type of media, but one had to change a jumper on the back, where one normally find the SCSI ID or Master/Slave jumpers.

Assuming that's a real memory and not something cobbled out of ghosts -- this would have been almost 30 years ago.

Might be worth a look on the problem drive to see if there are jumpers and if they're labeled. Of course a manual or datasheet would be even better if you can find one.
 

olePigeon

Well-known member
The Fujitsu drives I have can use any media automatically. Doesn't require jumpers. The jumpers just change SCSI termination, startup delay, enable/disable cache, etc.
 

olePigeon

Well-known member
So this was a long time in the making since my IIci had died and I nearly blew up my IIfx.

I was finally able to play with my JackHammer card. I discovered it just really isn't compatible with anything below 7.5. So my favorite 7.1.1 Pro OS is out of the picture. :( 7.1.1 Pro just freezes when it attempts to load the Finder. Not sure why. At least this is the behavior on my IIfx. I seem to recall I didn't have that particular issue with my IIci unless I was using my "broken" JackHammer* card (more on that later.)

Things I discovered: I need to disable the Shared Memory Caching. This option causes a "Memory BUS Error" on my IIfx. I wonder if it's because of the IIfx's funky memory. I also had to enable the non-FWB disk support, otherwise nothing would ever mount.

The fantastic news is that after updating to 3.2.6, my 2.3GB and 640MB disks mounted just fine. So the 512b/sec limitation appeared to be a firmware limitation and not a hardware limitation.

So million thanks to @slomacuser he was the one who found the 3.2.6 Firmware. It was included with an additional bundled CD with the Radius 81/110, and to my knowledge had never been uploaded anywhere. By the way, the update is completely and utterly undocumented. There wasn't even a ReadMe file accompanied with it. So one of the biggest feature updates for the FWB JackHammer went all but unnoticed. I'm guessing there was a blurb back in the day on AppleLink or AOL, but none of that made it to the internet to archived.

Also, thanks to @ktkm who put me in the right direction in regards to 7.5.

* As an added bonus, my 2nd FWB SCSI JackHammer that I thought was broken turns out to be fine. It was just even more picky than my other card. Under 7.5, it works just like the other one. I think ktkm had the same issue. Some cards were just more picky than others. Weird.

I also discovered that the Fujitsu MO driver isn't compatible with the JackHammer card. It'll scan EITHER the JackHammer's SCSI BUS or the computer's. Not sure what makes it determine which one to scan, but it'll never scan both. So I installed the Pinnacle Micro MO driver, and that one works great. It'll pop up a nifty MO drive icon during boot with the SCSI ID on it for both BUSes.

I can't believe how finicky these cards are. Apple's built-in SCSI is way more forgiving, especially when it comes to termination.

Now to duplicate the label from the original disk and make a new v3.2.6 JackHammer Utility disk, and include a ReadMe with everything I've discovered.
 

olePigeon

Well-known member
After reading @ktkm 's thread some more, I'm thinking that a JackHammer's compatibility with 7.1.1 Pro and 7.5 varies by machine. I wonder if it would continue to work fine in my IIci. But I guess that'd have to wait for another day.
 

MrFahrenheit

Well-known member
This is great news! Glad you got it all sorted out. 2.3GB MO is much more roomy than the 540MB maximum you thought it had (without the firmware upgrade).

I wonder if it would work with 4096 byte/sector 9.1GB MO…
 

olePigeon

Well-known member
This is great news! Glad you got it all sorted out. 2.3GB MO is much more roomy than the 540MB maximum you thought it had (without the firmware upgrade).

I wonder if it would work with 4096 byte/sector 9.1GB MO…
I believe the 3.5” 2.3GB disks are already 4096b/sec, so I think they should. Well, maybe. If we ever figure out the differences in formats.

I found Plasmon made disks at least all the way up to 60GB. But I bet those were proprietary. The machines they were used in looked to be the size of a full rackmount space, filled with probably 50 drives the or more + the cool robotic loading mechanism.
 

olePigeon

Well-known member
Apparently UDO is its own thing. It’s MO media that uses a finer laser like BlueRay. Goes up to 80GB. But it’s WORM only.
 
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