Re: Help needed - Vulcan hard drive

[jeffh@apple.com (Jeff Holcomb)]

In article <1993May6.062133.26815@slab.slip.uiuc.edu>,
derek@slab.slip.uiuc.edu (Derek Taubert) wrote:
> 
> I've replaced my old 40 Meg mechanism (RIP) with a newer Western Digital IDE
> drive (40 Meg also), but the firmware (Vulcan gold) is crashing all over the
> place because there is garbage written in the spot where there should be
> partition information.  I've tried running the part.manager, but it crashes
> right away, so I don't seem to have any way to write valid partition
> information onto the disk.  I'm going to have my roommate zero the disk on
> his Gateway system (and do a media check), but I don't know if that will help
> or not.

Back when I used to work at AE, the firmware for the drives was designed to
"know" about different hard drive models.  Somewhere in the firmware was
encoded a table describing info about each model (# of tracks, sectors,
etc.).  I suspect that your firmware doesn't know about your drive, so it
can't control the drive.

Also, the 40meg firmware only knew how to control 40 meg drives.  If you
want to upgrade the size of the drive, you need to buy a new EPROM from AE.
 :-(

There was a special backdoor in the part.manager software to get it to
write new partition info on drives.  Unfortunately I don't remember the
sequence to activate it.

--
Jeff Holcomb
Apple ATG System Software
Internet: jeffh@apple.com  AppleLink: JEFFH