[1394] Re: Firewire Formatting Utilities

[support at fwdepot]

Apple has never supported external FireWire devices with Drive Setup under
OS 9 - it wasn't until OS X and Disk Utility that Apple included that
function in their app.

You can only do a Finder erase disk under OS 9 unless you use a 3rd party
app such as FWB or Charismac or Intec Speedtools, etc.


>> While we can't recommend any third party driver, we do recommend either
>> using the Apple generic driver in 9.1 (if you do not need to partition a
>> drive), or Disk Utility in OS X.
>> 
>> FireWire Depot
>> http://www.fwdepot.com
> 
> Thanks for the response.
> I'm sitting in front of an 8600 with OS 9.1 running and Drive Setup
> (2.0.3) open to the drive selection window - but none of my Firewire
> drives are visible.
> Now I'm sitting in front of a G4 with OS 9.2.2 running and Drive
> Setup (2.0.7) open - again none of the Firewire devices are shown.
> Disk First Aid will allow me to test and erase these drives, but they
> are invisible to Drive Setup.
> DaleH
> 
> 
>> 
>>>  Back in the SCSI days before Apple's Drive Setup recognized 3rd party
>>>  drives, I used FWB's Hard Disk Toolkit on everything that was
>>>  external and SCSI.
>>> 
>>>  Now I have Firewire drives from half a dozen sources asking me to to
>>>  format with the distributor's tool of choice - Lacie Silverlining,
>>>  Charismac Anubis Utility, APS PowerTools, Intech SpeedTools - each of
>>>  which requires installing their own Firewire Support extension to
>>>  allow formatting.
>>> 
>>>  I'd like to be able to format all of my Firewire drives with one
>>>  utility. Since FWB is slow on answering via email, I'd like some user
>>>  feedback on whether other utilities might work on all Firewire/USB
>>>  devices.
>>> 
>>> DaleH
>>> 
> 
> 
> It is best to settle on a single FireWire driver for compatibility.
> 
> With OS 9.1 or higher you can use the generic FireWire driver that Apple
> includes.  You can't partition a drive with it, only format a drive.
> 
> With OS X, Disk Utilities is the way to go.
> 
> With OS 9.0 or earlier you have to use a third party driver.
> 
> Mixing drivers and formatting drives with different utilities can cause
> problems as not all third party drivers are compatible with each other and
> you may experience read/write errors.
> 
> While we can't recommend any third party driver, we do recommend either
> using the Apple generic driver in 9.1 (if you do not need to partition a
> drive), or Disk Utility in OS X.
> 
> FireWire Depot
> http://www.fwdepot.com
> 
> ----------
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