What does the PowerBook control panel do on a PB 165?

[Tom2112]

I recently was gifted a perfectly working PowerBook 165. What a wonderful gift! But I'm not familiar with PB's at all.

So I'm working on getting it upgraded with some more RAM and a replacing the HDD with a BlueSCSI or RaSCSI. I had lots of trouble today getting the RaSCSI working. I think a lot of it was SCSI termination problems. (My RaSCSI is external.)

The PB is running stock (and I think original) System 7.1. It has a Control Panel called PowerBook, which seems to let you change the sleep time for the display and the SCSI ID of ... something. I say something because I couldn't figure out what it was changing. The choices range from ID 1 thru 6, so I assume it's talking about the hard drive. But I changed it a few times and couldn't find any difference. According to SCSI Probe 4.3, the HDD never moved from ID1, no matter what I set in the Control Panel.

So what is this Control Panel for? How does it work? What am I doing wrong?

Thanks in advance,
Tom

 

[dougg3]

It is for SCSI disk mode, which lets you use the PowerBook as if it’s an external hard disk. The control panel lets you change the SCSI ID that it appears as when it’s plugged into the other computer.

 

[Tom2112]

Thanks Doug! That makes sense, because it certainly wasn't chaning the SCSI ID of anything internal, but I had read about that use-as-external-drive thing while trying to find a SCSI HDI-30 adapter. Cool feature for back in the day, but I can't see myself using it - in fact, the adapter that I got has that pin removed, so I couldn't use it for that even if I wanted to.

Thanks again!