🚀 go-pugleaf

Yesterday afternoon, I received an early-shipment copy of the new disk
formatter/driver from Rodime.

Changes and enhancements:

-  The new driver isn't bothered by the bug that Apple introduced in
   System 6.0 (or so I'm told;  I'm using 6.0.2, in which Apple fixed
   the bug).

-  The new driver/installer is capable of partitioning a disk.  You can
   create partitions of five different types (HFS, MFS, A/UX, ProDos,
   and "other"), and you can have multiple Mac partitions on the disk
   (Apple's HD SCSI Setup allows only one Mac partition per disk).

   While the installer can create A/UX and ProDos partitions, it does
   not supply driver software for the A/UX or ProDos environments.

-  All of the Mac partitions on the disk are normally mounted at boot
   time.  You can unmount individual partitions by dragging them into
   the Finder trashcan.  Rodime doesn't provide a desk accessory or
   utility for remounting partitions that you've unmounted;  Paul
   Mercer's shareware "SCSI Bus" CDEV does the trick quite nicely,
   though.

-  The new installer suggests the appropriate interleaving factor for
   your machine, but permits you to override its recommendation and use
   a 1:1, 1:2, or 1:3 factor (useful if you're going to use the disk on
   a machine other than the one on which you're formatting it).

-  When you select a drive for formatting and installation, the
   installer displays a window full of information about the drive:
   serial number, model number, block count, block size, total
   capacity, number of heads, and current interleaving factor.  This is
   a nice safety-check, so that you don't accidentally partition the
   wrong drive.  It also asks for confirmation before formatting.

-  The installer includes a "test media" command.  I don't know whether
   the media-test will map out bad blocks, or simply report them.

-  I've read reports that the new driver gives somewhat better
   performance than the old driver.  I haven't used it enough to
   tell... the drive is certainly no slower than it was.

-  There's a new disk icon (the old generic SCSI icon has been replaced
   by a schematic top-view of a drive's platter and head assembly).

You must back up the drive and reformat it to install the new driver.
I'd strongly recommend doing a file-by-file backup, in case the new
filesystem/partition is of a slightly different size than the old one
(an image-mode backup might not be restorable under these conditions).

I backed up, reformatted, and partitioned my disk last night.
Reformatting went smoothly, although there are some less-than-obvious
things about the necessary sequence of events.  I had to reboot my
machine four times to go through all of the steps: once to boot the
floppy and run the installer, once after formatting (to load the new
driver), once after deleting the default full-disk partition that the
format-and-install process had created, and once after creating the
three partitions that I really wanted.  The guy I spoke to at Rodime
acknowledged that the installer's habit of requiring multiple reboots
is a "pain in the ***", and will be corrected in a future version of
the installer.

The disk I received came without documentation (other than a small
ReadMe file).  It wasn't difficult to navigate through the installation
process using intuition as a guide, but there were some places in which
some directions would have been useful.  Documentation is apparently
being prepared;  I've been promised an early copy.

I've only been using the new driver for a few hours, so there may be
some GOTCHAs I haven't encountered yet.  It seems to be working OK,
though.  I restored 17.5 megs of stuff to the first partition on the
disk, and then ran Disk Express to optimize it (took about 20
minutes).  No problems so far.

The installer I received is version 2.02.  Rodime has made one further
change to the installer, to ensure that it can format drives "right out
of the clean-room".  I'm told that this change affects only the drive
assembly-line formatting, and is not required for user- or
dealer-initiated reformatting.  The updated version (2.03) will be the
one shipped to dealers.

I've received permission from Rodime to post the updated 2.03 driver to
comp.binaries.mac once I receive it... next week, probably.

-- 
Dave Platt                                             VOICE: (415) 493-8805
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