For those of you familiar with Connie, I am having a problem with an ATA drive attached to my Tempo Trio card.
The drive was recovered from a PC and is an 8G ATA IDE drive. It was a working drive when last used and had either XP or Milenium installed. I am trying to do a low level format and zero all data to give me a clean space. Disk Utiliy and Disk Warrior are not able to complete this task without abnormal endings or outright failure. There is no specific error code cited.
Can someone please reccommend a beefy tool to clear this fool drive (pref. shareware)?
TIA
--DDTM
I said Disk Utility but I meant Drive Setup.
sorry.
Drop the drive into a PC and run a pass on it with DBAN.
No PC's on hand, but I do have a G4 tower MDD (aka Wind Tunnel) running X.4.x.
I could pop it in there...
How about freeware instead? One of my old favorites for OS 9 is ATTO's Express Pro-tools:
http://mac.softpedia.com/get/Drivers/ATTO-ExpressProTools.shtml
I used version 2.7, so I don't know if 2.82 is much different, but even though it's a SCSI utility, it would also see my ATA drives and format them as well (ASP also sees all PCI ATA controller card drives as SCSI). ATTO can do a very nice low level format. It'll place the formatted drive up on your desktop as an ATTO drive, but then you can go into Drive Setup and reformat it to a standard Apple icon. Of course, a great many drives are not Mac formattable, especially in OS 9. I used the ATTO utility to revive and remount many faulty drives. It could often do that when Apple utilities and Diskwarrior failed.
What brand of drive is it, and which model?
I thought you weren't supposed to LLF IDE hard drives of that vintage... Drive Setup isn't supposed to let you LLF IDE hard drives at all, but because you've got it connected by the Tempo Trio, it's masquerading as a SCSI drive possibly fooling Drive Setup into letting you do things you shouldn't. That might be the reason for the odd behavior.
Not to sound like "one of those guys," but if it's only an 8GB drive, why not just junk it? IDE hard drives are big, fast, and cheap, especially on the used market. The Tempo Trio you've got can easily drive the biggest IDE drive you can find, and with that card, there's no need to restrict yourself to an 8GB partition for OS X (if that's what you're doing). 20 to 40GB should be easy to come by. And in OS 9, 40GB will give you plenty of breathing room.
Peace,
Drew
These two articles might be enlightening:
Drive Setup: Checking for Bad Blocks:
http://support.apple.com/kb/TA21976?viewlocale=en_US
Drive Setup 1.7.3 and Earlier Version History (Note the bit about LLF and ATA hard drives in version 1.7):
http://support.apple.com/kb/TA22667?viewlocale=en_US
Peace,
Drew
Yeah, so don't do it. As Drew points out, Drive Setup will think it's a SCSI drive and tries its best but will fail.
I seem to recall borking at least one drive doing this (ATA on a PCI card), cure was to put it on a native ATA bus on a wintel box and fixed with the Windows initializer.
Keep in mind that any drive used on your Trio won't be usable (without re-initializing) on a native ATA bus.
dan k
...and this seems to be the trick.
I will pull it from Connie and stick it in my MDD G4 and initialize it there.
Thanks all!
IDE drives hooked up to ATA cards on Macs are not formatted in a way that allows you to take one from the card and connect it to motherboard controller and still expect to get access to the files. For the drive to be usable on the motherboard, it must first be re-initialized.
Similarly, when you move a drive from a motherboard connection to an ATA PCI card connection, the drive must be re-initialized before it can be mounted via the PCI card.
This is because of some sort of wizardry that the hardware/firmware developers had to employ to get IDE PCI cards working in Macs and it is also related to why System Profiler reports IDE cards as SCSI cards. IDE drives connected to PCI cards on Macs appear to the system as SCSI drives. They are formatted strangely and must be re-initialized before they can be used on built-in IDE controllers. This is the essence of what Dan was saying.
However, if you happen to "fix" the drive using the G4's IDE controller, then great! Just remember not to LLF it again in Drive Setup when you've got it hooked up via the PCI card.
Peace,
Drew
...hook it to the G4 MDD, zero data and LLF then back to Connie's Tempo Trio and reinitialize (sans 0's and LLF options)...
...right?
I've heard both of these statements before and believed them--and even advised others on this--until I realized that I've been moving hard drives back and forth from onboard to controller card and vice versa all the time, not giving it much thought because my mind is usually jammed up in some problem at the time. I usually format all my ATA drives on the card because that's where I will usually have them connected, and many times when I'm having some problem getting a boot off the ATA card--after some project messing around with my computers' innards, scrambling the PRAM, usually--I will move the connection from the card to the onboard ATA in order to get the computer to see the boot hard drive system again and it works. I've done this many many times. I'll get the computer stable again and then move the boot drive back to the controller card connection and it will usually, eventually see it there again. I've just been doing that this past week with one of my Quicksilvers after messing around with flashing video cards. The hard drive I've got in my wife's QS was formatted on a card and then connected to the onboard ATA where it has since always been connected, working fine, always recognized.
I've also picked up Macs off the street which had drives hooked up onboard, put their ATA drives on my controller connection (Sonnet ATA PCI cards), and get full access to their files (this happens with some found PC drives too!), so from my experience, I don't know where this idea of not being able to move them back and forth between the two busses comes from. Perhaps, it is a problem with legacy Mac buses? My legacy experience memory is slippery on the subject. Or something to do with EIDE, back in the days when there were some differences between the generations of ATA and EIDE? Or maybe it's a difference between older ATA cards and newer ones?
Um, are you running OS 9 on your MDD? You've got OS X on that machine hopefully? 9 on an MDD is like putting bb's in an M-16. Zero data is all you get in X, and they've just said you can't LLF ATA drives. I always wondered why the LLF option disappeared with X's Disk Utility. So, LLF is only a SCSI protocol? What is different about ATA that doesn't allow LLF?
Anyway, like previously suggested, why hang out with an old 8GB drive from a PC? That 8GB drive is most likely an ATA66 5400rpm drive. Your Tempo can do ATA133, but the faster ATA bus speed will probably not make much difference with your setup, but moving from a 5400 drive to a 7200rpm drive will be a significant speed upgrade.
But I've had this conversation with you before and know that you want to spend $0 on this setup, or as close to as possible, which is part of the challenge. An MDD running OS 9, and a Tempo Trio running an ATA66 5400rpm drive, is like...hmm, I'll let someone else come up with another simile.
Oh, and then there's the other thing: a legacy Mac will not recognize a hard drive formatted in X's Disk Utility. Even if you install X on a legacy Mac using Xpostfacto, the drive must be formatted only with Drive Setup, not Disk Utility. So you'd have to be using OS 9's Drive Setup to format the drive for your 8600--that's with onboard buses, but since it's a PCI controller you'll be hooking it up to...don't know...probably the same rule would apply, I would think, but maybe not.
So yeah, get out the M-16 and shoot bb's at that drive and put it back in the 8600 and reformat again. Unless, of course, your MDD is actually a Firewire 800--which can't boot from OS 9 (oh wait, is that true...something about a special OS 9 for the Firewire 800 which it can boot from?)...so many things to hold in one's mind.
Personally I can't come up with any descriptions that don't use "colorful" (scatological?) language.
--Peace
No.
X.4.9
No, it is not, so yes it can (provided I reinstall it, which I may just now do).
For free, take. My ideal situation is to drop three 750G drives in this beast, but I live on a frayed shoe string at the moment and frugal options are luxuries that are hard earned. The 8G ATA gives me some much needed breathing room when you consider that the other drives in Connie are 2G, 4G, and 9G and almost all full. I am shuffling space where I can (and the question of why not burn stuff to disk is a topic for a whole other thread, and has been).
If my latest attempt to ressurect my Bondi iMac fail, then I will take the 120G out of that and give it to Connie.
Come to think of it, I've never actually put this assertion to the test myself. I've got a pair of 320 GB Maxtors on a Tempo Trio that are ready to be replaced by bigger, faster SATA drives and a SATA card... I'll have to try it out then. I can take a drive off the Tempo Trio and drop it into my MDD (which is the only Mac I own with a controller than will work with >128GB drives). I'll let you know if it works.
If there is truth to this urban myth, I suspect it to be based in the disk driver that is written to the disk by Drive Setup. There are different flavors of drivers for different styles of drives, and I suspect that the one installed by Drive Setup for drives attached to PCI IDE controllers is not the correct one for use with on-board IDE controllers and vice versa.
My experience, though, has always been with drives larger than 128 GB, so I haven't been able to use them with an on-board controller until recently. I do recall, though, that when the drives are fresh out of the box, they will not mount when connected by the
Tempo Trio. I always have to initialize them with Drive Setup first...
Peace,
Drew