Miscellaneous Ramblings

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Hard Drive Troubles and a USB Adapter Upgrade

Charles W. Moore - 2000.11.13

In our last installment, I related how my BTO Umax SuperMac S900 would stall for severalminutes during startup before finally completing the boot process.Several readers kindly emailedsuggestions, but nobody nailed the cause of the problem. However, atthat point the machine would at least boot, albeit with the pause.

When we first set up the SuperMac back in July, and again in lateAugust, it manifested episodes in which it would refuse to recognizethe hard drive, a Seagate Barracuda 2.15 GB, 7200 RPM unit purchasednew as part of the BTO package from Other World Computing. In bothinstances, my Mac tech guru son, Tristan, performed some SCSI voodooduring weekends home and got the S900 working properly again. Indeed,it worked fine (save for the startup stall) all Fall until last week,when the dreaded flashing question mark once again began appearing.

By happenstance, Tristan was home for a few days. He spent anevening alternatively stroking and goosing the SCSI bus until hethought he had it fixed again. Unhappily, the next morning, there wasthe question mark blinking at me.

All along, the machine has been quite happy to boot from a CD,floppy disk, or a Zip disk, so our suspicions had been directed towardthe hard drive itself. This time we tried installing the little 160 MBQuantum hard drive from my old LC520. The S900 happily booted from that under System 7.5.5 with noproblem.

The night before this latest episode of boot reluctance, I had beenchecking out some beta software and had experienced a bunch of hardcrashes, although the machine had restarted normally after each one andhad been put to bed properly using the Shut Down command.

However, now we could not get the Seagate drive to mount even withSCSI Probe. Whether we booted from the Zip drive or a CD, attempts torun Drive Setup resulted in the program crashing to a Code 4 error.Neither Disk First Aid nor Norton Utilities could see the drive,either. Finally, we stuck the drive into the LC 520 and establishedthat the old machine would not recognize it. Of course, the old LCcould not have booted Mac OS 9.0.4, but the drive did not respondenough to even tell us that (it did spin up) .

'Time for a low level reformat of the drive,' said Tristan. Most ofthe data on the drive was mirrored on my WallStreet PowerBook, but Ihad just done a large software download and hated to lose those files,so we decided to try mounting the drive with Tristan's Lombard PowerBook in faint hope ofretrieving them. However, to our surprise, the drive mounted via aSCSI cable adapter without a hiccup, and we were able to save theunbacked-up files to the Lombard's hard drive.

That accomplished, we initiated the low level reformat and decidedto eliminate the partition that had been installed with the previousformatting. We installed OS 9. The Lombard booted up fine from theSeagate drive. The drive was reinstalled in the S900, and it seemed towork well there, too. Not only that, but the stall while booting wasgone. I spent the rest of the evening transferring my files back ontothe drive from the WallStreet via ethernet, reasonably confident thatthe problem was finally dealt with.

No such luck. The next morning, when I tried to boot the S900, therewas the flashing question mark again. Mas que nada satb pdf file.

Back into the guts of the S900, thankful that it is a relativelyeasy machine to open up and work on. Tristan pulled the Seagate drivefor the umpteenth time, went to the Seagate website, and found thetechinfo page for this particular model drive. He deduced that theconfiguration jumpers had been factory set for PC and not Mac use, andaltered the settings accordingly, as shown on the web page.

That seemed to help somewhat, and when we reinstalled the drive inthe Umax, the machine appeared to be working fine - that is, until thefollowing morning, when it wouldn't mount the drive again. Tristanadmitted that he was stumped - unusual for him.

By a bit of trial and error, I discovered that I can get the Umax toboot by inserting a CD, waiting until the boot process commences, thenhitting the reset button . At that point, the S900 will mount theSeagate drive, and I can eject the CD once the machine is booted. Oncethis initial startup has been achieved, the machine will restart asmany times as you want from the system on the hard drive, or even shutdown and restart so long as you do it immediately. Let it sitovernight, or indeed for an hour, and the problem returns.

That's where things stand at this writing. It's not verysatisfactory. The machine is usable, but starting it up is a majorhassle. I suppose there would be the option of leaving it running 24/7,but my wife complains about the noise at night, even though thecomputer is 20 feet from the bedroom.

I am inclined to suspect that the Barracuda drive is eitherdefective or somehow incompatible with the S900, since every otherdrive we have tried boots it fine. I shall be contacting Seagate to gettheir spin on the issue.

MacAlly PCI USB Adapter Card

On a happier note with which to end this progress report, I havealso installed a MacAlly PCI USB adaptercard in one of the S900's PCI slots, and itworks beautifully. I don't have a lot of USB peripherals, but an iMackeyboard (old type), a hockey puck mouse, and a Cirque Easy Cattrackpad now work nicely with the big Umax.

Installing the adapter a simple matter of opening the S900's case(one thumbscrew and some elbow-grease), removing the blanking plateover an empty PCI slot aperture (one Phillips screw), inserting theMacAlly card in the slot, and replacing the securing screw and the caseside cover. It was about a five-minute job start to finish.

The instruction booklet for the MacAlly PCI to USB Card recommendedtrying Mac OS 9's own USB support first if you are using OS 9. However,there didn't appear to be any USB drivers included in my OS 9installation.

Some Apple website URLs are provided in the booklet, but they areoutdated and produced 404 errors. The instructions specify Apple's USBAdapter Card Support version 1.3.5, which is also obsolete information,since the current version was 1.4.1, which is what I installed on theS900.

You can find it the software download links by doing a search for'USBAdapter Card Support' on Apple's Web page. There are three optionscurrently: version 1.4.1 of the software is recommended for Mac OS 9.x;it comes in International and North American English variants. Version1.2 is recommended for Mac OS 8.5.1, and 8.6, which are the oldest OSversions that support USB. I downloaded version 1.4.1 North AmericanEnglish, a little over 700 k for the compressed file.

Installation of the USB support software (a collection of systemextensions) took a few seconds, and, after a restart, my iMac inputperipherals worked nicely.

However, if you plan on using a USB keyboard with one of these oldmachines, you may want to keep an ADB unit connected as well. Severalfunctions, notably the power button and Command + Control + the powerkey for forced restarts, do not work with the USB keyboard (this isnoted in Apple's support notes).

But behind this simple task, there are options you may not be aware of. You know that a picture located in any of your folders can be inserted on a slide. But, have you wondered about the relation a picture on the slide has with the original picture located in your folder? How do i make a link clickable on a mac.

The MacAlly PCI to USB Card sells for $69.00.

MacAlly PCI to USB Card features:

• Compatible with MacOS 8.5.1 or later
• Requires Macintosh with available PCI slot
• Installs quickly and easily to internal PCI slot
• Provides two USB Type A ports
• Fully compatible with USB specification
• Plug and Play
• Supports multiple MacAlly PCI to USB card for additional USBports
• Lifetime warranty