Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ncar!ames!oliveb!felix!kehr
From: kehr@felix.UUCP (Shirley Kehr)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Rolling your own 60 MB drive with a Seagate ST277N?
Message-ID: <69003@felix.UUCP>
Date: 12 Nov 88 19:50:57 GMT
References: <17734@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU>
Sender: daemon@felix.UUCP
Reply-To: kehr@felix.UUCP (Shirley Kehr)
Organization: FileNet Corp., Costa Mesa, CA
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In article <17734@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU> korfhage@CS.UCLA.EDU (Willard Korfhage) writes:
>
>  We have some Mac II's with CMS Pro-60II/i internal hard drives. We are
>going to purchase some more Mac II's, and we are curious about the
>possibility of rolling our own CMS equivalents.
>  I've looked at the CMS drives, which use the ST277N, and it appears to
>be relatively simple.  The drive has an embedded SCSI controller, so there
>is no worry about that. You need a data cable and a power cable, which
>should be easy to find or make. You also need some mounting hardware; I
>have no idea where to find this. And last, but not least, you need
>software, and pervious messages on this general topic have pointers to
>SCSI drivers.
>  Is it as easy as it would seem?  If anyone has already done this, I
>would like to hear from you.
>
>  Thanks in advance.
>
>   Willard Korfhage
>

You might be interested in my experiences of the past week.

I have a Mac II with this hard disk. For a couple months I ran 
System 6.0 with zero problems.  I finally upgraded to 6.0.2 and
then my problems started. 

I read on the net that if you upgraded the CMS drivers to 4.0 the
drive was compatible with 6.0.2. After having trouble getting the
drive to boot, I did update the drivers.

That was the beginning of the end. For the week after upgrading to
6.0.2 I was having to clear parameter RAM (CMS's ZapPRAM program or
just Command-Shift-Option while opening Control Panel) every day to
get the system up. After installing the new drivers, even that
didn't work.

Some magical combination of things finally got the drive to boot
Friday, so I cautiously double-clicked on a Word document. The icon
disappeared (leaving the name on the desktop).  I tried another that
I didn't mind losing and the endless wristwatch came up.

Powering down from the back, and then starting up from the CMS diskette
was successful, but the CMS software could not format the drive.

(I gave up this quickly because I had a full tape backup from 2 days
ago, and that was what we had to do on an identical system 2 days ago.)
Eventually, we had to call for service and the hardware tech did a 
low level format then formatted, initialized etc. the drive with Apple's\
HD SC Setup. I've restored the drive with the tape backup and I'm back
in business.  I guess it will be some time before we know how stable
the drive is as an Apple vs CMS drive.

The hardware tech has some program from Apple which he modified to
make the drive work again. I feel more comfortable with this arrangement
because we've had lots of CMS drive failures. This is the first time
the solution has been to keep the drive in the machine. Usually the drive
goes back to CMS for a week or so.

The hardware tech thinks the drive is great, but the software is the
real problem.  I'd say you are on the right track, but I don't know how 
to tell you to start with that first low level format that he did. After
that, use the Apple software perhaps.

Shirley Kehr