dplatt@coherent.com (Dave Platt) (10/13/88)
Yesterday afternoon, I received an early-shipment copy of the new disk
formatter/driver from Rodime.
Changes and enhancements:
- The new driver isn't bothered by the bug that Apple introduced in
System 6.0 (or so I'm told; I'm using 6.0.2, in which Apple fixed
the bug).
- The new driver/installer is capable of partitioning a disk. You can
create partitions of five different types (HFS, MFS, A/UX, ProDos,
and "other"), and you can have multiple Mac partitions on the disk
(Apple's HD SCSI Setup allows only one Mac partition per disk).
While the installer can create A/UX and ProDos partitions, it does
not supply driver software for the A/UX or ProDos environments.
- All of the Mac partitions on the disk are normally mounted at boot
time. You can unmount individual partitions by dragging them into
the Finder trashcan. Rodime doesn't provide a desk accessory or
utility for remounting partitions that you've unmounted; Paul
Mercer's shareware "SCSI Bus" CDEV does the trick quite nicely,
though.
- The new installer suggests the appropriate interleaving factor for
your machine, but permits you to override its recommendation and use
a 1:1, 1:2, or 1:3 factor (useful if you're going to use the disk on
a machine other than the one on which you're formatting it).
- When you select a drive for formatting and installation, the
installer displays a window full of information about the drive:
serial number, model number, block count, block size, total
capacity, number of heads, and current interleaving factor. This is
a nice safety-check, so that you don't accidentally partition the
wrong drive. It also asks for confirmation before formatting.
- The installer includes a "test media" command. I don't know whether
the media-test will map out bad blocks, or simply report them.
- I've read reports that the new driver gives somewhat better
performance than the old driver. I haven't used it enough to
tell... the drive is certainly no slower than it was.
- There's a new disk icon (the old generic SCSI icon has been replaced
by a schematic top-view of a drive's platter and head assembly).
You must back up the drive and reformat it to install the new driver.
I'd strongly recommend doing a file-by-file backup, in case the new
filesystem/partition is of a slightly different size than the old one
(an image-mode backup might not be restorable under these conditions).
I backed up, reformatted, and partitioned my disk last night.
Reformatting went smoothly, although there are some less-than-obvious
things about the necessary sequence of events. I had to reboot my
machine four times to go through all of the steps: once to boot the
floppy and run the installer, once after formatting (to load the new
driver), once after deleting the default full-disk partition that the
format-and-install process had created, and once after creating the
three partitions that I really wanted. The guy I spoke to at Rodime
acknowledged that the installer's habit of requiring multiple reboots
is a "pain in the ***", and will be corrected in a future version of
the installer.
The disk I received came without documentation (other than a small
ReadMe file). It wasn't difficult to navigate through the installation
process using intuition as a guide, but there were some places in which
some directions would have been useful. Documentation is apparently
being prepared; I've been promised an early copy.
I've only been using the new driver for a few hours, so there may be
some GOTCHAs I haven't encountered yet. It seems to be working OK,
though. I restored 17.5 megs of stuff to the first partition on the
disk, and then ran Disk Express to optimize it (took about 20
minutes). No problems so far.
The installer I received is version 2.02. Rodime has made one further
change to the installer, to ensure that it can format drives "right out
of the clean-room". I'm told that this change affects only the drive
assembly-line formatting, and is not required for user- or
dealer-initiated reformatting. The updated version (2.03) will be the
one shipped to dealers.
I've received permission from Rodime to post the updated 2.03 driver to
comp.binaries.mac once I receive it... next week, probably.
--
Dave Platt VOICE: (415) 493-8805
USNAIL: Coherent Thought Inc. 3350 West Bayshore #205 Palo Alto CA 94303
UUCP: ...!{ames,sun,uunet}!coherent!dplatt DOMAIN: dplatt@coherent.com
INTERNET: coherent!dplatt@ames.arpa, ...@sun.com, ...@uunet.uu.netdplatt@coherent.com (Dave Platt) (10/14/88)
Yesterday, I wrote that Rodime had promised to send me the very-latest
version of their new disk driver/formatter and documentation. When I
came in to work this morning, a FedEx overnight-letter package was
waiting for me; it included the 2.03 formatter disk, a marked-up draft
copy of Rodime's new "Software User's Guide", and some Rodime product
announcements and an end-user bulletin.
The new documentation is very much superior to the software-use
information that was shipped with the Rodime 45-meg internal drive we
recently purchased. It describes all of the steps needed to format and
partition a Rodime drive using the new software, gives troubleshooting
instructions, explains the effect of different interleave numbers,
explains disk partitioning, explains the disk subsystem's
defect-handling strategy, and [hurrah!] lists the telephone number, FAX
number, and Telex and AppleLink addresses of Rodime's tech-support
department.
I've posted the latest&greatest Rodime formatter/driver to
Info-Mac@sumex and to comp.binaries.mac, with Rodime's permission.
Rodime dealers should have this software in a few weeks.
--
Dave Platt VOICE: (415) 493-8805
USNAIL: Coherent Thought Inc. 3350 West Bayshore #205 Palo Alto CA 94303
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