c60c-4bj@web-4c.berkeley.edu (Rob Pfile) (11/20/88)
Greetings.
About one month ago, my roommate and I, both EECS majors here at Cal Berkeley,
decided to build a hard disk for our Macintosh. After reading an article
in the September/October _Computer Shopper_s dealing with building hard
disks, we decided that it would be economical, fun and not too difficult
to put one of these things together.
It didn't work.
What we are sitting on here is a Seagate 277R 65meg RLL drive and an
Adaptec 4070 SCSI-RLL controller/converter.
As per the Computer Shopper article, we tried to use Ephraim Vishniac's
SF&I program to format and install the driver, carefully following and
(we think) understanding the process. That did not work.
After raising Mr. Vishniac over the net, we were able to obtain a copy
of a newer program, SF&I 4070, which is designed specifically for the
4070 controller, and incidentally is easier to use. The only modification
neccesary seems to be to the mode data, which tells the software how many
heads the disk has and how many cylinders are on the disk, etc.
However, we were unable to format the disk with this program either.
We have been in touch with Mr. Vishniac, and still have been able to get
this thing up and running.
My question to the mac world is: Has anyone done this successfully using
SF&I or SF&I-4070? We need help with finding out just what the problem is
here.
A minor point which may be the cause of our problem is that we managed to
get an *older* version of the 4070 firmware which seems to be just a bit
buggy, but *should* still work. It seems that adaptec fixed this with a
new Eprom (and possibly different hardware), but no retailers acknowledge this
in order to sell the old stock off.
Does anyone have any information about this?
Thanks. We would appreciate hearing from anyone else who has done this
correctly.
Rob Pfile
c60c-4bj@web.berkeley.edu
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