Problem mounting a 6 GB drive with System 7

[superpantoufle]

Hi all,

In the early nineties, when the 80 MB hard disk of the family's LC III became a little bit short for my growing needs, I bought my first piece own piece of hardware: a huge (at least for me at the time) 365 MB external SCSI hard disk. That disk served me extremely well for 16 years, and still works like a charm. Up until last week, it was filled with various working System folders from 5.x to 7.x that I used to boot and perform clean installs on "new" liberated machines. Then I found that 6 GB SCSI disk lying in one of my boxes of stuff... and I decided to enjoy more storage with my "boot 'em all" HD!

I remembered about the 2 GB volume size limit with System 6.x and 7.x, so I partitioned the 6 GB drive into four 1.5 GB volumes. I did the backup and the partitioning on my PowerBook 1400c running 8.6 without an issue. But the drive doesn't mount on my PowerBook 145 running 7.1. It's seen by SCSIProbe, but when I try to manually mount it, it throws an alert dialog saying that "a 68040 or PPC is needed in order to mount volumes larger than 4 GB". :-/

What I don't understand is:

a) There is no volume larger than 4 GB on that drive. Only four 1.5 GB volumes (formatted in standard HFS, by the way).

B) I was aware of a 2 GB volume size limit with System 7.1, but I never heard of a CPU-related volume size limit.

Well, obviously the alert is thrown by SCSIProbe and not by the Finder, because my System is SF-7.1 (swiss french), and the dialog is in english. And a 7.1 install isn't supposed to speak about PowerPC...

Does anybody have a clue about why I can't get that disk to mount, formatted and partitioned the way it is? Any help would be greatly appreciated, I really don't feel like switching back to my 365 MB disk. I hadn't time to test it with other 7.x machines tonight, but I will tomorrow. Thanks in advance, and sorry for my rough english (with a slow swiss french accent!)

 

[protocol7]

I think the issue might be with formatting it in 8.6 (presumably with Drive Setup?). Try formatting it with Apple HD SC Setup. I did this with a 18GB external SCSI drive and it mounted fine on my Classic II as well as my LC III.

 

[ojfd]

Any chance that you've initialized the drive as HFS+ ? [] ]'>

 

[Dog Cow]

Any chance that you've initialized the drive as HFS+ ? [] ]'>

HFS+ volumes have a very small volume that will mount on HFS machines. This volume contains a single text file explaining that one must update to OS 8.1 to view the rest of the files of the hard drive. IIRC, this text file is named Where_have_all_my_files_gone

 

[ojfd]

Any chance that you've initialized the drive as HFS+ ? [] ]'>

HFS+ volumes have a very small volume that will mount on HFS machines. This volume contains a single text file explaining that one must update to OS 8.1 to view the rest of the files of the hard drive. IIRC, this text file is named Where_have_all_my_files_gone

Do you know for sure that it also applies to drives partitioned under OS 8.x? I don't. Besides, it was just a wild guess.

 

[protocol7]

Actually I just thought of something. You probably don't need to reformat the disk with HD SC Setup. Just click the "Update" button in it. That will replace the disk driver installed by Drive Setup with it's own one. There's a good chance that the volumes will mount after you do this.

 

[24bit]

Salute superpantoufle,

I would re initialize your drive with one of these:

http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/apple-hd-sc-setup-753-patch

http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/lido-756

Partitions for every single driver are added on HFS disks, there may have been messed up something. Which app did you use for partitioning?

To be on the safe side, low level format it with GPartEd or else to remove all old partitions and use one of the utils above to initialize.

Best wishes!

 

[superpantoufle]

Hi all,

You probably don't need to reformat the disk with HD SC Setup. Just click the "Update" button in it. That will replace the disk driver installed by Drive Setup with it's own one. There's a good chance that the volumes will mount after you do this.

Wow, that did the trick! Thanks a lot! I updated (actually downgraded) the disk driver with Apple HD SC, and all four volumes mounted straight away. No need to reformat nor to copy back several gigabytes to that slow disk. The only things I lost in the process were my custom disk icons.

Any chance that you've initialized the drive as HFS+ ?

No chance... as was clearly stated in my original post. ;-)

But thanks for asking! 8)

By the way, I recently tried by mistake to mount a HFS+ volume, which was most certainly formatted using 8.6 or 9, on an older system, and it indeed showed the small partition with the ReadMe file indicating to upgrade to 8.1 or later.

Well, once again thaks a lot to all of you! I now have a working 6 GB "vintage usb stick" to sneakernet files around the collection!