Formatting Old SCSI drive on old MAC & DD hardware

[nyder]

Hello.

I have a friend who has a Quadra 950.

It has a DigitalDesign machine of some sort hooked to it, an 888 IO, and something else.

It has a 4gb SCSI external Harddrive connected to one of those machines.

He knows nothing about computers, which is why he asked me to help.

Originally I thought he wanted another harddrive in his system, got a 36gb scsi, used an 50pin adaptor for it. Works fine under the macos 7.51 he's running, but unfortunetly, that wasn't what he needed.

I'm pretty sure it's was ProTools 4.5 that he had installed on his machine.

It's hard for me to get overthere, or I would have gone back and checked to find out what machine the harddrive is hooked into. He can't seem to understand enough to look for me, so I'm hoping someone here is familiar with the older mac machines and can point me in the right direction.

at the least I need to know if I can hook another drive into that chain, so he can use both, or if I should swap them out.

I also need to know how to format it so protools or whatever programs can see that drive to put the audio on.

any limitations on hardware, formatting, and what the connecter is I can use (the harddrive is a SCA with a 50 pin converter on it. if it can handle fast scsi, then I can get a different adaptor).

I'm hoping to get back there thursday and would love to get it formatted and working. At worse, I can get more details of what it's plugged into.

thanks

[M.Brane]

SCA drives with adapters can be problematic, and SCSI is subject to enough voodoo without adding that to the mix. Better to use a 68-pin drive if you can't find a true 50-pin.

The golden rules of SCSI are:

The last device on the chain, and only the last device must have termination enabled, or be a terminator if the device cannot provide it (most SCA/68-pin drives do not have on-board termination).

Each device must have a unique ID#. ID#7 is reserved for the host.

Cheap SCSI cables can, and likely will cause you problems.

That said the drive should be formatted as HFS. HFS+ wasn't supported until 7.6.

[nyder]

I'm sorry, your misunderstanding.

I know how scsi works.

What I don't know is what device that scsi drive is connected to.

It does NOT connect to the mac, it connects to some DigitalDesign Hardware.

I'm hoping someone is familiar with the DD hardware used in the 90's can tell me what it would be connected to, so I can figure out what it needs to be formatted with.

It's not a normal HFS format, it seems that the hardware it's connected to has a special format or something.

If your not familiar with DD hardware from that era, you are probably not going to be able to help me.

I know i'm asking a lot. This isn't my normal way of doing stuff. I'm supposed to go back there this thursday, so If i don't have it figured out, I should at least know what hardware is being used.

[stonehenge]

sounds like a pro tools iii system - the scsi drives (along with the audio interface) connected to the disk i/o card, not to the mac or other scsi card. you'd need digi's scsi cable for this. haven't seen one in years, but i think it was just called a disk i/o scsi cable or something like that. look on their archive site http://archive.digidesign.com

hey, i found an old page with some pics http://archive.digidesign.com/support/propix/

[mix109]

He is probably using PT 4.1 or 4.3(there is no 4.5 Version as far as i can recall)
http://archive.digidesign.com/suppor...4.3Readme.html

So in order to format the Drive(s) after u hook them up using the DD proprietary(in a way) 50 pin SCSI Cable,you can use AppleDrive Setup,or for Better management FWB Hard Disk Toolkit.

FYI The MacOS on this Apple can be upgrade to 9.0.1 and u can use PT 5.0.1 with a DAE
engine patched for PT III

[milesofwire]

As I remember when I had a monster of a Nubus Pro Tools III rig is; You have to connect the SCSI drive(s) directly to the Mac's SCSI port in order to format or initialize, Then when done connect back to the Disk I/O cards SCSI cable...