Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!mcsun!sunic!draken!ianf
From: ianf@nada.kth.se (Ian Feldman)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: 1/2 system disappeared
Summary: Rodime HD early ROM version a likely suspect
Message-ID: <2511@draken.nada.kth.se>
Date: 10 Dec 89 13:44:50 GMT
References: <4ZUV61S00WBLI26mkL@andrew.cmu.edu>
Reply-To: ianf@nada.kth.se (Ian Feldman)
Organization: Royal Institute Of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
Lines: 74
Cc:ianf@draken

In article <4ZUV61S00WBLI26mkL@andrew.cmu.edu> Brad Hathaway writes:
>
>Yesterday, a friend of mine tried to print a pagemaker
>file from my mac II to a DeskWriter.  There was a
>system crash, and the next time that I booted up,
>roughly half of my system folder was gone.  Just gone.
>
>Weird.  Alphabetically, everything after PMUSUSER.TXT,
>which (coincidentally or not) is a PageMaker document,
>is missing.  The system folder is actually called
>"Server Folder" 'cause I have the server software
>installed.
>
>The very weirdest thing about this is that the system
>still boots from my hard disk, and recognizes that the
>server folder is the current system folder . . . even
>though there is no file named "system" in the folder!
>
>I took a look at the files in the system using MacTools,
>to see if they had somehow become invisible, but to no
>avai.

  [ list of suspected INITs deleted -- they're not responsible anyway ]


  Is your hard drive, by any chance, a Rodime RX4500 (45 Plus)
  (internally called R3000S), formated using Rodime Driver Utility
  2.04 or later?  I am asking because that's the usual behavior of
  my drive after having been "updated" from 2:1 to 1:1 interleave
  using Utility 2.10 - losing most of the stuff in the system file
  and yet being able to boot from it.  Doubtless, there is money to
  be made on this perfectly security-minded "Never-Seen"[tm] System
 "feature"  ;-)

  The drive used to behave perfectly in its previous incarnation of
  interleave 2:1/ driver v. 2.03, which it shortly is going back to....

  While I cannot really know if that's the real reason for your &
  mine troubles I know that the SCSI Manager recognizes the totally
  invisible System/ Finder and boots up, passing control to the
  System that _also_ recognizes the invisible INITs but denies
  them the right to be loaded on account of their being invisible
  (= a virus-like behavior in Apples parlance).  That last "feature"
  seems to have been added from System 6.0.2 onwards.

  Incidentially, my troubles started after simply copying several
  files to a newly created System folder on the external and then
  making several of the documents - not INITs though - invisible
  with the help of the DiskTop (I do like my System folder uncluttered
  and there are absolutely no reasons to have all the myriads of
  strange Preference- and System-folder-resident datafiles visible,
  taking up screen real estate and prolonging the time it takes
  to display its contents).

  I guess the problem has to depend on same strange incompatibilities
  between the three "actors": the Rodime controller ROM, its Driver
  Utility version and some Macintosh programs' behavior.  Thus far
  I have not been able to find out which ones are to be recognized
  for their more-than-usual sense of duty.

  I happen to have 2 Rodimes R3000S, however, one of them internal,
  the other external.  The only difference between them, as far as
  I can see, is that the external one (the one with interleave 1:1
  and _repeatedly_ invisible stuff on it) has ROM version 2.14 while
  the internal's one is 2.21.  The internal has never given me any
  trouble and yet it is formatted with 1:1 interleave, using the
  same Driver as the external unit.

  Apple, Rodime, do call me for the license to the "Never-Seen" name
  of your coming trusted-system-software feature ;-)


--Ian Feldman /  ianf@nada.kth.se || uunet!nada.kth.se!ianf  / "How can men &
       women ever come to an understanding?  They're not even of the same sex."