Configuring new SCSI drive with Charismac Anubis

[efunc]

Hi folks,

I guess I'm in the right place for this. My old Seagate Barracuda died so I went on eBay and bought a Compaq BD1468A4C5 - 147GB SCA 80pin SCSI drive for an HP Proliant server. I have other 80pin and 68pin drives in the 9600 and use them just fine with 50pin adapters. However this one was different. Drive setup in MacOS 8.6 or 9.1 do not allow me to Initialise it. I get the warning for it in my list of drives, and a message "Cannot Initilize a disk in an unsupported drive".

I've not known this to be the case before although I've been using a mix of server HDs such as 9gb, 18gb, 36gb, 50gb and 73gb ones. At first I thought it's because it's 147gb, but even OS 8 recognises 2TB apparently. I also thought it might be the HP firmware, even though it's probably a Seagate drive.

Anyway, after a lot of research I thought I should try a different formatter. I found a very old floppy of Charismac Anubis in my archives which I'd never used, but lo and behold, it worked and successfully initialised and mounted the drive! The issue now is that I'm a bit twitchy about the long-term viability of this. I've only ever used Apple's HD driver and don't like 3rd party ones like HDT, etc because in the past I found you had to follow more complicated procedures when installing OS, backing up, repairing, etc. Is the Charismac Anubis driver an install-and-forget kind of affair? Anyone have any experience? The installation also installed an System Extension which scans and mounts all SCSI volumes during boot-up, including my existing Apple ones. Instinctively I don't want to mess with my other drives that have worked right for 15 years(!) so is this Init necessary to keep, or can I dump it?

Finally, and this is a plea, does anyone have an old copy of Charismac Anubis 3.5.2? The one I have is 3.0, but a web search reveals that 3.5.2 was the newest, however Charismac appear to be defunct, and after an entire night of searching I can't find anywhere to get a copy. I want something that will play fair with MacOS 9.2 and possibly 10.3.9. Any help? Thanks.

[John_Toolbox]

I've never used that particular utility you are referring to, but I do remember at one point thinking I had scored an aweseome deal when I bought a lot of 10 brand new 9GB SCSI drives(80pin) for $50. What I discovered, was that these drives needed to be formatted with a 3rd party utility(I think I used Hard disk toolkit), and while they worked with the 80pin to 50pin adaptor boards, you could not daisy chain them. So my vision of having this giant 10 drive 90GB array for $50 was quickly diluted.

The conclusion I came to was that it was best to stick with SCSI drives that were able to be formatted with the mac OS. Unfortunately, in 2013 your options are extremely limited in what you can still find, I think that all that remains of SCSI is used drives. I also seem to remember trying a drive that had been formatted for PC first, and not being able to format it with a mac(or maybe that was the other way around).

[efunc]

Thanks John, I have to say, I've got very good luck with most non-generic SCSI drives over the years, even though they have HP, Dell or Compaq firmware, etc. They seem t be available in bulk on ebay for very cheap, so worth experimenting with. My 147GB was only £20 new! and you can get 300GB ones these days for a bit more (like, $50?).

Anyway, this is the first one that hasn't been recognised my Apple Drive Setup, but at least Charismac Anubis seems to be the solution. It's just a shame that it's no longer out there, and seems impossible to track down. Luckily I have an older version at least.

If anyone knows of v3.5.2 please let me know. In the meantime I'll record some audio on this drive and see if it plays sessions OK. In which case we may have found a decent large drive for older Mix+ rigs.

[John_Toolbox]

One other thing I have tried that definitely works, is the IDE to SATA adaptors. I actually ran a G4 on a 2.5" SATA drive this way and it worked great. Im not sure if there are also SCSI equivalents of these, but if there are and they work, that would also be an option.

[efunc]

Hi John, thanks for the reply, and yes, you have a very good point regarding ATA. If I was on my G4 I would probably rely on ATA drives more, however since I'd have to give up a valuable PCI slot on my 9600 I always stuck with native scsi drives. I can get 300GB 10k Cheaters for very little money these days and that's more than enough space for me. Hopefully I can get hold of the last version of Anubis and then keep this setup alive for a few years more.