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If all else fails... FWB Hard Disk Toolkit!

pee-air

Well-known member
...And if FWB HD Toolkit fails, then your beautiful nine gigabyte Seagate Barracuda drive is dead. It's dead, Jim!

I swapped the 2 gigabyte drive out of my Quadra 700 and replaced it with the Seagate Barracuda. I then tried to reinstall A/UX on to the new drive. Disaster struck. The A/UX installer's drive partitioner couldn't find the disk. It reported that there were no suitable drives to be found on the SCSI bus.

Not one to give up easily, I began looking for other ways to format this drive. I knew it could be formatted to work on the Mac because I had used this drive on a Mac before. I also have two other Barracuda drives in active duty. So there was a glimmer of hope.

Alas, the glimmer of hope has faded to grey. I tried everything. I started with every version of Apple's Drive Setup and HD SC I could find. HD SC 3.1 -- the version for A/UX -- crashed the system and I had to reboot. Other versions of Apple's HD SC could not find a drive on the SCSI bus. A few older versions of Drive Setup found the drive but reported it as "unsupported". More recent versions of Drive Setup found the drive and reported it as "uninitialized". Although when I attempted to initialize the drive with the newer versions of Drive Setup, it failed and said that the drive was too large to be formatted as one partition. It advised that I use the "custom setup" option to partition the drive and try again. However the "custom setup" button was greyed out and I was unable to do anything but get error messages saying that the drive was too large for a single HFS partition.

Time to bring out the big guns...

I then went to the patched version of Apple's HD SC software. It's said to work on anything but the crack of dawn. But it wouldn't work on this drive. It just crashed my system and forced me to reboot. So I went to SilverLining Lite. It formatted the drive with no reported errors, but failed when attempting to install the driver. Silverlining Pro looked like it would fare better, but it too failed. Drive 7 was my next try. That was a total waste of time. And so I ended up trying the mother of them all: FWB Hard Disk Toolkit.

I have heard that FWB can format a drive made of popsicle sticks and contact cement. But it won't format this 9 GB Seagate Barracuda. It bombs by giving me a dialog box that says, "Hardware error encountered." So it would seem that this drive is pooched... Dead... Done... Garbage.

 

wthww

Computer Janitor
Staff member
Honestly, if you can hook it up to a PC, I would reccomend zeroing it. on nix its "cat /dev/urandom > /dec/

//wthww

 

pee-air

Well-known member
I don't have a PC that I can hook it up to. It's a SCSI drive and I don't have a PC with a SCSI interface/bus to connect it to. I'll try the utility from Mac OS 9.

 

tomlee59

Well-known member
Whatever you do, do NOT try the "magnet/degausser trick" that still pops up from time to time. That's a sure way to brick your drive permanently.

 

Forrest

Well-known member
Sorry to state the obvious - but you do have a SCSI terminator installed on the drive (directly) or an external terminator at the end of your SCSI chain?

 

pee-air

Well-known member
Yeah, I have a terminator. And If I pull the drive from the enclosure and replace it with another, it works fine. So it's not a SCSI issue. It's a drive issue.

 

tomlee59

Well-known member
How have you configured the jumpers on the Barracuda? Active termination on or off; where is termination power coming from; etc.? Your swap experiment does show that the problem is drive related, yes, but it doesn't pin down what of the drive is the problem. Still could be termination related.

 

pee-air

Well-known member
The drive that I am using does not have termination resistors on it. It relies on the SCSI bus for termination. ie. an attached terminator in the case of an external drive.

All of the jumpers are set correctly. Here's what happens when I try to format the drive with Drive Setup 1.7.3.1

  1. This screenshot shows that Drive Setup recognizes the drive as
     
  2. This screenshot shows Drive Setup's response when I select the disk
     
  3. This screenshot shows how Drive Setup responds when I attempt to initialize the disk
     
  4. This screenshot shows that Drive Setup won't allow me to select {Custom Setup}

The problem, according to my limited understanding of the situation, is that the drive needs to be low level formatted. Unfortunately, the 9.1 GB Seagate drive is too large for Mac OS 8.6 to format. So it wants me to partition the drive into smaller logical units. But Apple's Drive Setup software won't allow me to partition the drive because it is not formatted. It's a real Jim Dandy of a situation.

Only thing I can think of off the top of my head is to do what wthww had suggested. Put the drive in another machine and zero it from that machine. But I don't really have another machine available that has a SCSI bus. So I'm kind of screwed.

Well, I suppose I could install Linux or NetBSD on the old SGI box and try to zero it from there. But that means having to go through all of the trouble of actually installing Linux or NetBSD on the old SGI. And I'm not feeling too enthusiastic about that. Damn! I wish I had a SCSI card for my X86 Linux box. I should invest in one.

-------------------------------------------------------

1 The last version of Drive Setup to run in Classic Mac OS.

 

pee-air

Well-known member
Okay, that's two hard drives now. The nine gigabyte Seagate Barracuda can't be formatted on a Classic Mac OS machine no way, no how. Now my lowly little two gigabyte IBM Apple ROMed hard drive is exhibiting problems. This one I can get formatted, but the disk setup software bundled with the A/UX installation media won't touch it. It's reporting a hardware problem. And I know for a fact that there is nothing wrong with this particular drive.

IRIX does something to hard drives that the Macintosh operating system just does not like. I don't know if it changes something that probably shouldn't be changed or what, but IRIX appears to be the common denominator. Both drives worked perfectly fine before they became the unsuspecting prey of the IRIX 6.5 Installation Tools CD. What gives? What does IRIX do to poor defenseless SCSI hard drives that makes them forget who they are?

 

Charlieman

Well-known member
Whenever you get a hard drive that refuses to format, try a different formatter. If FWB Toolkit fails, try Anubis. If that fails, try something else on a Mac. If the Mac fails, try formatting the disk in a PC (you can often do it from DOS or firmware on the SCSI card) before trying the same cycle on a Mac.

Often, SCSI drives that have been used in NetWare, NT or Unix servers refuse to play with a Mac. With perseverence, if the drive works, you will find a solution.

 

caryn

Member
Charlieman's reply has the Truth You Seek! I find that I can many a 9G drive on A/UX by first doing a low-level format on a str8 Macintosh 7.5.5 system with Anubis 3 (I prefer 3.09 but 3.04e works fine).

You should NOT have to use a DOSBOX to format you're drive. I have yet to find a drive that Anubis cannot format (queue the poor soul who cannot get their obscure Conner 40MB 5.25" FH drive to format).

Bear in mind that just because the drive was working when you pulled it, doesn't mean it works now. If you "get" Anubis (ahem), it's probably best---given all your troubles---to use the Format-Verify-Remap option (possibly twice). The best option is the "Erase-Format-Verify-Map-Format" one, but I have found that Seagate drives are highly resistant to running this option, so unless you've got some time to kill, I'd stick with Format-Verify-Format (maybe twice). Do NOT select the "Asychronous" option---maybe go so far as to boot with extensions disabled (and definitely remove SCSI Manager if it's present).

The trick is to get the Unix partitions on it "by hand"---there's no way I know of to use the scripted install process. You'll need to go in, delete the MacOS partitions, repartition A/UX slices (I advise two 4GB and one "left over" slice, for /, /usr, and maybe /var---but you could leave / as 1GB-2GB and add a /usr/source slice).

If you're still trying to get this going, respond with where you're at and I'll see if I can be of more specific help. I have 4 Fujitsu SCA80 9.1GB drives I use in an external can for A/UX, so the drive size is not necessarily a problem---though 4GB IS the filesystem limit on A/UX. Also, if you can get the drive up as a "second" drive on an A/UX box, you may be able to partition it there and then do a new install to it.

Once it's up, don't forget to get a DISKTAB entry for it! Also, I'm sure you noted this, but for lazy folks (OK, me), could you give the model number (and firmware version, if you have it).

Oh...and I'd stay in the 7.5.5 OS, on a 68k machine, if possible. Maybe drop an old 500MB drive in the designated A/UX box, stick OS 7.5.x on it, upgrade to 7.5.5, hang your 9GB Seagate off it, and format it there.

OK...let me know if you're still trying to beat it into submission...

caryn

 
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