🚀 go-pugleaf

peter@cara.demon.co.uk (Peter Ceresole) wrote:

>>How does this business work in regards to the System Folder? Can I delete
>>it, format and partition the drive, reboot from a SyQuest/CD and then just
>>copy the System Folder back?

>It certainly seems to work from a Zip (once I'd sorted out the blessing of
>the system folder). Should be fine from a Syquest.

It was - after I was forced into it!

The 3400 refused to boot, giving a variety of errors - Type 10s, 'Chk's,
just hanging ... All very odd, because it booted fine on Sunday and not on
the Monday. No installations or system-type alterations in the meantime.

Anyway, fortunately this was all two days after my SyQuest arrived, so
everything was backed up. I thus reformatted the drive, created five
partitions and copied the system back on, blessing it just by opening &
closing it as someone suggested should work. Only ... the machine had
suddenly turned into a 512. There was about a 1.5 second delay between
clicking on something and the machine taking any action.

So I called the Apple Helpline. 33 minutes of hold music later, I spoke to
someone who knew less about partitioning hard drives than I do, and that's
a pretty impressive achievement. She refused to escalate the call, saying
calls on the 90-day free support contract are only dealt with on her floor.
One call to Customer Services later and they agreed to put me through to
someone who knew what they were talking about. Interestingly, this was not
an Apple employee, but a dealer.

Anyway, the upshot is that partitioning larger drives (mine's 2-gig)
carries a significant speed-hit on the IDE drives used in PowerBooks. The
Mac apparently has to search each partition separately everytime you
double-click on something. It seemingly has no way of knowing that you've
just double-clicked on something in partition 3, it checks the lot!

The solution was to create just two partitions, a 100Mb one for all my tiny
text files (lots of little snippits at 2k or less, which were talking up
32k blocks), and the other one for the rest of the volume.

Apple also advised that there is a bug in system 7.6 which effects
PowerBooks, and suggested I upgrade either to 7.6.1 or directly to 8.

Oh, and my Internet sigs seemed to be the only thing I missed in the
backup, hence the absence of any.

Ben