Help Needed

[joecfd1]

Newbie here...Sorry for my first post being in need of something. I have a machine shop in SoCal. We run our CNC machine programming software on a Quadra 840AV. Recently I lost a hard drive. I am constantly buying units for replacement drives. Any way, my newest drive doesn't recognize a pc 3.5 floppy where as all of my previous drives did. It only recognizes a mac formatted disc. I really need to be able to read the pc disc as well to import .dxf files from my customers. Am I missing an extension or something? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks, Joe

 

[beachycove]

You probably need the PC Exchange Control Panel.

 

[basalgangster]

Very cool that you are using a Quadra to control a CNC machine. Would be great to see a picture.

 

[Mk.558]

For System 7.0/7.1, PC Exchange 1.0.4 is the tool to have.

For 7.5.x+, it can be installed from either the install CD or the floppies through the Installer.

 

[joecfd1]

Thank you for the advise. I ended up downloading MacDisc on to my pc so my pc can now read the mac formated floppy instead of the mac reading the pc formated disc. End result, i'm able to transfer from my pc to the macs one again!

Thanks, Joe

 

[olePigeon]

Since you have it working, probably a good idea to put PC Exchange on your Mac, as well.

Since you have an 840AV, you could set up a local FTP Server (make sure it's not on the internet) on your PC, then use an FTP program to copy files to and from the PC and Mac. It'd probably be faster than a floppy disk, and you could do larger files.

 

[joecfd1]

Where do I find a copy of PC Exchange? Is this on the system discs?

Thanks Joe

 

[olePigeon]

System software version 7.0 or later has PC Exchange in the Install options. System 7.5 version 7.5.3, which includes PC Exchange, is available for download from here:

http://download.info.apple.com/Apple_Support_Area/Apple_Software_Updates/English-North_American/Macintosh/System/Older_System/

You might be able to just mount all the disks and find whichever one has PC Exchange on it, then copy it over.

Here's a premade preference file with most of the popular PC extensions already mapped to Mac apps:

http://net68000.freeshell.org/pcexpref.hqx

And here's Fetch for System 7, an FTP client:

http://fetchsoftworks.com/fetch/download/Fetch_4.0.3.sit

 

[uniserver]

Sir,

Please snap a couple pictures of your CNC / Quadra840av set up.

Thank You.

We love pictures, and your Mac setup there is interesting to us.

Charles

 

[James1095]

You're buying whole Macs just to get the hard drives?

U320 server drives with an adapter PCB drop right in and work great. They tend to be a lot more reliable than ancient consumer drives, and they're dirt cheap currently. When you have the system up and running, copy the whole hard drive over to a spare, then if the drive ever fails, just swap in the spare and go.

 

[Bunsen]

U320 server drives with an adapter PCB drop right in and work great.

However, one does need to check the specs of said drives to make sure they can operated in single ended (8 bit SCSI-1) mode. This is more common with Ultra160 drives, but there are a number of U320 drives that retain backwards compatibility. The 2.5" Seagate Savvio drives * give you plenty of room in a 3.5" drive bay to also mount the adapter.

It also seems to be important that your adapter provides high-byte termination (termination resistors on the unused upper 8 bits of the 16 bit wide SCSI bus). There are a number of threads here discussing the use of these modern drives if you want to have a search and compare notes.

* be sure you are buying a SCSI version, not a Fibre Channel (FC) or Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) version.

 

[joecfd1]

I was buying the Quadras just for the hard drive, I didn't realize there was an alternative. My Mac doesn't run the CNC but it is used to program and generate the G code which my machines use. There are much newer versions of programming software but I'm lazy and cheap! I will snap some pics and post them if I can figure how to do so. I may ask for some detailed help with this alternative drive you were mentioning. Maybe someone can find an Ebay auction with the appropriate equipment? Thanks for the help.

Joe

 

[James1095]

There is nothing special about the SCSI drives used in the Quadras, they're just ordinary consumer grade narrow SCSI drives.

Do a search on the forum for Seagate Savvio, there has been quite a bit of discussion. I bought a couple some time ago that I run in a couple of my old Macs. I believe Uniserver bought a whole pile of them, usually they can be found for 10-15 bucks plus a few dollars for the adapter board and a few more for a bracket to mount it in the 3.5" space.

If you don't care about noise, lots of 10K U320 server drives will work, but the 3.5" ones tend to scream like a jet taking off.