>Just following a rather alarming thread on Macintouch re' installing Mac =
Os
>8.5 and drive corruption especially those formatted with FWB drivers.
According to the Umax site, and after extensive testing, the very, ve=
ry
low percentage of drives that experience this problem (which is a very ser=
ious
problem) they found:
-----
http://www.supermac.com/service/os85caveats.html
<A HREF=3D"http://www.supermac.com/service/os85caveats.html">UMAX Mac OS 8=
.5
Info</A>
....
Rare Issue: Hard Drive Damage
While our testing with Mac=A0OS=A08.5 (Golden Master release) has
predominantly been problem-free, it has also resulted in the
inexplicable loss of several hard drives. This does not appear to be
indicative of any fault with the SuperMac computers, their hard drives,
nor Mac clones in general -- multiple Apple hard drives, formatted with
Apple's own Drive Setup software and installed in Apple PowerPC-based
systems, have also been lost in our testing. As of Thursday, October 22,
we have received several users reports of the same problem, and the
popular Mac info web sites MacInTouch and Mac News Network have fielded
additional user reports.
This problem is very elusive, but in some variations is fully
recreatable. It will probably affect only an extremely small number of
users -- but to those users, its impact may be severe. We have chosen to
publish this information for the sake of those users, who,
unfortunately, may not know who they are until the problem occurs.
The first sign of the damage is usually the "disk with flashing question
mark" icon at startup, indicating that no suitable boot volume can be
found. The second is that FWB Mounter (included on all SuperMac System
CD's) cannot mount the drive and reports that it cannot read the first
block of data on the disk (Block 0). (Damage to Block 0 can indicate
that irreparable harm has been done to the disk.) Less common but also
observed are failures during the installation process itself, during
which the target drive vanishes from the desktop and the installer stops
with an error message. All three of these problems have been observed
both in SuperMac systems and in stock Apple systems with Apple hard
drives under Mac=A0OS=A08.5.
A variation on these symptoms is that the drive first appears to be okay
under 8.5, then experiences a severe performance degradation which grows
gradually worse until it becomes unusable. The drive icon may vanish
from the desktop, the Finder may report that the drive has experienced
data loss, FWB Mounter may not be able to mount the drive, and
diagnostic utilities such as Disk First Aid, TechTool Pro 2, and Norton
Utilities may be unable to see the disk. Of the six drives lost under
Mac=A0OS=A08.5GM, only two Apple and one third-party drive could
successfully be reformatted. While older FWB HDT drivers can be used to
regularly recreate some of these symptoms, the larger field of samples
and user reports from the field suggest that the problem is not unique
to FWB drivers.
We regret that, to date, our testing has failed to conclusively isolate
the cause of these losses. Hard disk driver corruption or data loss at
the first block on the disk (Block 0) appears to be a consistent
element. There is no indication that the drive brand, make, model,
firmware revision, capacity, number of partitions, driver version,
termination status, SCSI ID number, SCSI bus, age, whether it's the
startup disk or not, whether it's SCSI or IDE, whether it's formatted as
an HFS or HFS+ disk, or whether it's supported by Apple Drive Setup or
not are factors. In short, there appears to be no way to predict a given
drive's susceptibility to this problem nor whether or not a drive will
be recoverable and reformattable after the problem has manifested
itself.
....
----
This information provided to help those interested in moving their
digital systems to 8.5. Because of the apparent complete uncertainty of t=
he
cause of this problem, IEBA Productions recommends staying with your curre=
nt,
older Mac OS. If you do upgrade, do not do so without a full backup of the
startup drive. Even then, we only suggest upgrading non-critical systems.
For more information, please see:
http://www.macintouch.com/m85_diskdamage.html
<A HREF=3D"http://www.macintouch.com/m85_diskdamage.html">Mac OS 8.5 Speci=
al
Report: Disk Damage Issue</A>
Anthony
________
Anthony Burokas, Media Technician, IEBA Productions, Inc., Phila. PA
+ Digital Video Consulting and Integration + DV/ DVCAM Sales +
V: (215) 632-3283 + Fax: (215) 612-0663
Go to: <A HREF=3D"http://ieba.com">IEBA.com</A> to find out more.
"Ok, so what's the speed of dark?"