[MacDV] Re: can't see formac ext disk

[Michael Winter]

On May 19, 2004, at 1:48 PM, Mark Walker wrote:

> thanks for this help, but...
>
> does this apply if the mac is saying the disk needs initialising - 
> it's just it sounds more like something which would prevent any 
> communication between disk and computer?

Another possibility is that the driver has been corrupted. The way the 
system normally works (extrapolating a bit from SCSI) is that when the 
computer initially  "sees" a drive, it sends a request to the drive for 
the software to communicate (the software driver), which the drive 
normally sends back to the computer. The computer then "loads" this bit 
of software and full communications are established.

If the drive does not respond to that initial request from the computer 
with an appropriate driver, the computer assumes the drive has not been 
formatted and asks you if you want to format it. That could be what's 
happening in your case.

To fix that, I've always had to run a utility that will use its own 
"generic" driver to mount the drive instead of having to get the one 
being stored on the drive. The trick is to find a utility that will do 
this for you. IIRC, Disk Utility should do this for you. You said it 
doesn't "see" it. Does that mean that nothing at all is showing up for 
the drive in the left-hand column? If you do see something there, try 
selecting it and clicking the "Mount" button. I know I've done this in 
the past with different utilities (from Micromat and Norton), but maybe 
somebody else knows more about the capabilities of the newer versions 
to tell us if they will mount a drive with a corrupt driver.

-Mike