Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!gatech!mcnc!decvax!decwrl!labrea!agate!saturn!ucscc.UCSC.EDU!fiatlux
From: fiatlux@ucscc.UCSC.EDU (David Vangerov)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: HDisk dissapear, but still there!?
Message-ID: <2752@saturn.ucsc.edu>
Date: 10 Apr 88 07:34:11 GMT
References: <22103@tis.llnl.gov>
Sender: usenet@saturn.ucsc.edu
Reply-To: fiatlux@ucscc.UCSC.EDU (David Vangerov)
Organization: Apathetic Surf Club (we don't surf and we don't care)
Lines: 85
Keywords: driver, SCSI, restart, Mac II.
Summary: There is a way to get it back without re-initializing!!!

In article <22103@tis.llnl.gov> sierra@ati.tis.llnl.gov (Frankie Sierra) writes:
>I have been using a Peripheral Land 90i hard disk on my Mac II for
>about 4 weeks without any problems.  But last night, I was checking
>out some public domain desk accesories using a DA tester program.
>As usual one of those DAs crash on the Mac II, and I press the RESTART
>button in the bomb dialog with no effects (as usual again).  Thus I
>proceed to press the programmers button to restart the machine, and
>guess what, the system found no disk to boot up.
>
>After inserting the floppy system disk, I perceived that the hard disk
>was not present on the desktop (was not mounted).  After checking with
>various system utilities, all of them agree in that there is no hard
>disk installed on the SCSI port 0.  But when using the Peripheral
>Lands utilities, the disk is there and in good shape.
>
>I dismounted the hard disk, boot up without it, remounted again, but
>no luck.  All connections are fine.  It seems like the system got
>amnesia.  How can I make the system to believe that in fact the Hard
>Disk is there?

Oh boy, is this ever a recurring problem with the Mac II. Before
spring break I got a call from a woman who was having some
trouble with a Mac that she was using (I think it was a 512KE)
and during the converstation she asked me if it was possible to
wipe out a hard disk by hitting the restart button. I said no and
she said that she was working on a Mac II at work and had done
that and boom! no more hard disk. They (supposedley) had to
recover the disk from a backup. And they weren't too happy with
her about this. They didn't have to re-format the drive and
restore from a backup. It seems that they were bit by a "bug"
that when a program dies in some way and you hit the restart
button, the drive internal drive doesn't re-appear. I'm assuming
that Frankie's drive was an internal one. From the sounds of it,
he got bit by this same "bug" that this woman had and that our
lab has. We've been hit by it a couple of times and someone else
on campus has had a similar problem. 

Ok, here's what I've figured out on how to "fix" the drive. For
those of you with an Apple 40 meg hard-drive in there you get out
your Utilities Disk. Boot-up with this disk. On there should be
this nifty program called "Apple HD SC Setup". Make sure you have
the latest available version of this. I believe it should be 1.4
or 1.5, but I'm sure someone at Apple can verify this for me.
(you are listening, Apple, aren't you?). This is the program that
is used to initialize the drive at first and install the driver
for it. In addition to intializing, you can test the drive or
update the driver. I've found that by either testing the drive or
by updating the driver the drive itself comes back and you've got
no problems. The first thing I do is test the drive. If that
works then you've got no problems. If that fails (which is
unlikely) you then should "Update" the driver. When doing this
make sure you have the latest version of the software available.
The version we have is 1.4 and has a date of June 9, 1987 for
when it was created/modified. This seems to work fine for us for
the two times that it has "bit" us.

For those of you who have third-party drives I don't know what to
do. Your hard-disk should've come equipped with Utilities similar
to Apple's HD SC Setup progrm. You should have the option to
update or test the drive. Try using either of those options and
as I said, your drive should come back to life. I've only dealt
with the 40 meg Apple drives, so things may be just a little
different with third-party drives. 

As I've said, this seems to be a recurring problem with internal
hard-drives on the Mac II. Apple, is it possible to track down
this problem and fix it? Or if you can't, at least tell the users
that a "bug" exists that causes the system to "forget" about the
internal hard-drive and tell them what to do to fix it and NOT to
re-initialize the disk. If the drive can be recognized by the
setup software, then the drive is not damaged and no data has
been lost (except maybe from what you were just doing). I've seen
this happen when using MacWrite, MacZapTools, and Public-Domain
programs that don't quite work right. It doesn't happen often
(thank god!), but when it does it tends to make the user panic
(as it did to me the first time) and is also a pain.

Sorry for the length and I hope this helps...


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|		     	        David Vangerov				     | 
|    Just your average Theater Arts major with a weird thing for computers   |
| fiatlux@ucscc.BITNET || fiatlux@ucscc.ucsc.EDU || ...!ucbvax!ucscc!fiatlux | 
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