brion@cbnewsh.att.com (brion.n.feinberg) (07/21/90)
I recently purchased a Drive 2.4 and Rapport to provide SuperDrive cababilities for my Mac II. I then "wasted" several hours pinpointing the following problem. Sometimes, after restarting my machine, the Drive 2.4 would not be recognized. At first I thought I had a loose connection. In fact, when I would remove the Rapport unit and reattach all of the cables, the drive would work again, but soon it would stop working. By playing around with different possibilities, I finally determined that simply unplugging the Rapport from the Mac after shutdown would make the Drive 2.4 work. But otherwise, shutting down the Mac II and then starting up the machine left me with a dead drive. When I finally got Kennect Technologies to call me back, we were finally able to narrow down the cause. I have an external hard disk, and I normally left it on, even when I powered down the Mac II. Apparently, the harddisk would feed power to the Macc II over the scsi connection. This fooled the Rapport so it didn't realize that the Mac had been shut off and it wouldn't restart the Drive 2.4 correctly. The solution - turn the hard disk off when powering down the machine. Kennect claimed they could do nothing about the problem since it is a "faulty" Apple design which feeds the SCSI power back into the Mac II. I was surprised Kennect hadn't already heard about this problem. So, I've licked that problem, but if you have a hard disk you keep under your desk or someplace out of reach, you'll have trouble when you shut down a Mac II (Kennect said newer models overcome the SCSI power problem). Note that simply restarting the machine doesn't cause the problem. Other than that, the drive works fine. Brion #include <std.disclaimer> brion@honet9.att.com