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From: ts@cup.portal.com (Tim W Smith)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Removable "HD"s -- are they worth it?
Message-ID: <20986@cup.portal.com>
Date: 3 Aug 89 07:15:50 GMT
References: <9095@venera.isi.edu> <3000@blake.acs.washington.edu> <458@asterix.drev.dnd.ca>
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Lines: 62

I've not had problems exchanging data between cartridges formatted
with PLI, FWB, and Mass Micro software.  There are two situations:

	1. You want to copy data between the cartridge and your
	hard disk ( non-removable ).  The cartridge is a bootable
	cartridge.

	2. Like case 1, except that the cartridge is not bootable.

	3. You want to copy data between two cartridges formatted
	by different vendors' software.

Case 1 is the simplest.  Just boot with that cartridge in the drive.
That will load the driver that was put on the cartridge when it was
formatted, which we hope knows how to deal with that cartridge.  It
does not matter that a different vendor repackaged the SyQuest drive.
The're all the same to the software.

Case 2 might depend on who formatted the cartridge.  Some of the above
mentioned formatters will place a driver on any cartridge they format.
Actually, I think all of them do, but I wouldn't swear to it.  If the
formatter does place a driver on the cartridge, then it can be handled
like case 1.

The only thing I can think of that might cause a problem here is that
there is probably an INIT resource hanging around in your System Folder
that was supplied by the drive vendor.  The purpose of this INIT is to
make sure that there is a removable driver loaded if the disk in the
drive contains no driver ( or if there is no disk ).  However, the
INIT should be checking first and if it sees that there already is
a driver, it should not load another one.  If it does not do this
check, however, you can remove that INIT from your system folder
and try again.

Case 3 is the most likely to cause problems.  From observation, I
have determined that cartridges from the three vendors listed above
will, if formatted with one partition, contain a standard Apple
partition map, readable by all the others.  They will work fine.
If you have multiple partitions, they should still work ( FWB, for
example, seems to read both old and new format partition maps and
respond correctly, even though their formatter program will not
create cartridges this way ).

The problem occurs when there are password protected partitions.
Either PLI or Mass Micro ( I forget which ) has a password protection
scheme.  When I tried making a cartridge with N partitions, it made
a partition map that contained one standard Apple partition, and N-1
with a vendor specific format.  These N-1 could be password protected.
The other two drivers could handle the first partition but ignored
the other.

The solution in this case is to boot with the cartridge containing the
protected partitions in the drive so that it's driver will be used.

Summary: In most cases, data exchange is no real problem.  Just pop
out your cartridge and pop in the foreign cartridge.  It will probably
work!

						Tim Smith

ps: If you though disk swapping with floppies was a pain, just try
copying a file from one cartridge to another!