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 - There's a new disk icon (the old generic SCSI icon has been replaced by a schematic top-view of a drive's platter and head assembly).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.net
dplatt@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 UUCP: ...!{ames,sun,uunet}!coherent!dplatt DOMAIN: dplatt@coherent.com INTERNET: coherent!dplatt@ames.arpa, ...@sun.com, ...@uunet.uu.net