Mac68k Forums

I have a small pile of verified good Quantum Atlas III 9.1 GB drives that I'd had in mind for some other projects. I'm trying to get them to play nice with my IIsi, but all efforts seem to be in vain. They format very nicely under Mac OS 9.1 on my PM9600, but everything I try to do with them barfs on the IIsi. I've tried formatting (including low-level) with Silverlining and Anubis 3.1, and they all seem to encounter bizarre errors reading and seeking, which leads me to believe it may actually be a conflict on the SCSI layer (Atlas III is solid SCSI-3, while the 53C80 in the IIsi plants it pretty much under software control, but generally basically SCSI-1).

Both Anubis and Silverlining perform the low-level format just fine, but seem to fail constantly on reads, seeks, etc. Anubis says it fails to write the boot block, while Silverlining gives up on the verify tests before it even tries to write anything.

If I format it with Drive Setup on the Power Mac (using HFS, not HFS+), it can be read just fine there, but it crashes the IIsi before it even tries to boot a floppy (no great surprise there, probably just a newer SCSI driver that blows up on the IIsi). Same holds true if it's formatted with FWB on the Power Mac.

Anyone have experience trying to run larger SCSI drives on '030 hardware? Even better, anyone have successful experience?

Smaller, even. Doesn't seem to want to play with the disk much at all.

I might try something I saw on a 68kMLA thread with some 72GB drives: format/partition on Power Mac, drop into a Q700 running 8.1, reformat from there, and it works on older machines. Supposedly. These were Savvio 2.5" drives, which may behave differently from the Atlas III.

Interesting that it works fine on the Power Macs, then. Perhaps it's something from the SCSI-1 standard that the 53c96 avoids but the software stack controlling the 53c80 hits? I'll have to see how it likes the Quadra 700, then.