Re: Apple GS & Zip Drives

[supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer)]

ljsilicon@aol.com (LJSILICON) wrote:

>Here's an interesting observation on the GS and a connect Zip drive. If you
>format a Zip disk on an Apple GS as an HFS valume and then move the disk to a
>Mac, the disk is not readable. If you format the disk on a Mac and move it to
a
>GS, the GS will add a 5k ProDOS partition. Once that is done, the GS will read
>the Mac Formatted volume. Has anyone else seen this strange behavior. By the
>way, the SCSI interface is a RAMfast w/latest ROM.

LJ, the behavior you see is the result of the Macintosh driver partition.
Unlike the GS, the Macintosh stores its device driver in a special 5k
partition (the GS stores its device drivers in a folder).  When you format
an HFS volume on the GS with the RAMfast utilities, that special driver
partition does not get created.  That's why the Mac can't see the disk.
It would be like not having the RAMfast driver in the GS drivers folder
...which would prevent you from seeing all but 2 partitions.  If you
format the Mac driver partition of a Mac formatted Zip disk like you just
did above (erasing it to a 5k ProDOS volume), that disk is no longer
readable on a Mac.

The solution is to format the Zip disk as an HFS volume on the GS
with Apple's official partition utility, Advance Disk Utilities.  Because
the Zip disk is not an Apple disk, you will also need a program called
GenEx (look at the root directory of ground for the upload98 folder...
in the February subdirectory is a program called GenEx that I posted
on cba2 a few weeks ago).  GenEx extracts a GenericMacDriver from
Advance Disk Utilities.  Put that driver in the GS drivers folder.  Now
do a low level format in Advance Disk Utilities, partitioning the disk
as a single HFS volume.  Advance Disk Utilies should install the
GenericMacDriver into a Mac driver partition.  Unlike disks created
on a Mac, howerever, the driver partition created by ADU is invisible
on the GS' Finder.  Zip disks created in this fashion can be read on
both Macs and GS without problem.  ADU can be found on the disks
that make up System 6.0.1.