[comp.sys.mac.hardware] CMS Harddisk/SilverLining problem

thomas@duteca (Thomas Okken) (04/13/91)

A friend of mine has a Mac Plus with a CMS SD30U 30 Meg hard disk drive. He
has recently added a CMS/SyQuest 45 Meg removable HD drive, and uses Silver-
Lining to format his removable cartridges, which works fine.
When he tried to install the SilverLining driver on the fixed hard disk,
something went wrong: the drive refuses to mount, and both the CMS Setup
utility and SilverLining fail to recognize the drive. They recognize a SCSI
device at the right ID, but not that it's a hard disk known to them.

I have had a similar problem some time ago, which went away miraculously
after some unreconstructable activity with several utilities, and this
problem seems to be very common when people switch to different drivers
for their SCSI hard disks.

Does anyone know how my friend might get the use of his hard disk back
without reformatting? Without losing the data on it, if possible?
And: why does replacing the drivers with SilverLining go so disastrously
wrong, so often? Are we doing something wrong? The documentation does not
warn of these problems!

 - Thomas (thomas@duteca.et.tudelft.nl)

knapp@cs.utexas.edu (Edgar Knapp) (04/14/91)

In article <1281@duteca.UUCP> thomas@duteca.et.tudelft.nl (Thomas Okken) writes:
>
>Does anyone know how my friend might get the use of his hard disk back
>without reformatting? Without losing the data on it, if possible?

I doubt that the Norton Utilities will be of much help to you since the
driver seems to be shot, but for only $49.- it may be worth a try:
(800) 441-7234. They may come in handy later, anyway.

>And: why does replacing the drivers with SilverLining go so disastrously
>wrong, so often? Are we doing something wrong? The documentation does not
>warn of these problems!

You bet, you are doing a no-no. Messing with a driver without a current
backup means inviting disaster. Also, I tend to prefer to do a
low-level format first before changing drivers. I have never run into
any problems this way.

Edgar

(knapp@cs.utexas.edu)