phaedrus@milton.acs.washington.edu (The Wanderer) (01/18/90)
on purchasing one because of it), I thought I'd let you all know what happened.
First of all, I can't exactly laud the Ehman technical staff. It took me
three days of telephone tag to actually get through to someone at Technical
Support--the first person I reached just told me to reformat the drive and
restart, without mentioning that the formatting software itself is the
problem.
The answer is this: HDD Manager, the standard formatter/driver installer
shipped with Ehman drives in the past, creates a boot block/driver scheme which
is incompatible with the IIci. A new program, HDD Formatter, is required to
create a formatted drive which is actually bootable on a IIci. The lady I
talked to today (after holding for over 15 minutes, for fear of not being
called back as happened to me in the past) was quite helpful and prompt with
this answer, and is sending me the HDD Formatter by overnight mail. I'll let
you know if any catastrophes result from this.
In summary: if you have an Ehman drive and don't have a IIci, don't worry.
If you have a IIci and the drive shipped with HDD Formatter, use it (removing
any data you want from the drive first), then install System 6.0.4 using
Apple's Installer program (the drive ships with 6.0.3, which won't work
either), then restore any other data to the drive.
There's no way to make the drive boot the IIci without HDD Formatter.
If you need to use the drive before this (to store files temporarily, or to
remove data from the drive before reformatting), there's a kludge that works
and doesn't require any additional software. Start the IIci from a floppy with
the hard drive turned off, wait for the Finder desktop to appear, turn on the
hard drive, waiti for it to spin up, and run HDD Manager. Tell it you want to
reinstall the driver; this won't solve the problem, but will mount the hard
drive so that you can use it from the Finder or other programs. This procedure
must be repeated at every restart.--
Internet: phaedrus@u.washington.edu (University of Washington, Seattle)
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