Installing Drive In An External Case

[Mayo]

Well here I am...I finally got the Western Digital 200GB 3.5" drive correctly seated in the external case; initially I had the mounting brackets reversed.  I'm not too good with printed instructions, but I do my best.

Anyway, I am finding the mounting screws to be a tad tight.  I'm never comfortable putting a screw into plastic; that is one small part of modern life I will always think is a Very Bad Idea.  I have for screws that came with the drive, and four screws that came with the enclosure (FireXpress 350DX from Compucable).  They all appear to be the same size.

So do I need to use some force to get these screws set?  Is it akin to driving wood screws?  I don't want to strip the holes.

As long as I am on the subject: I elected to leave the drive's jumpers set to Master/Cable Select Mode.  The enclosure instructions said to configure it to Single mode, or to Master/Cable Select if Single is not available.  I prefer to leave things simple, if possible, since changing things doesn't always work out well for me...And getting that little jumper shunt off seems like a chore; how does one grip it?

Otherwise, I think I got it together so far without damaging anything.  I was surprised how much I had to bend the IDE cable in order to get the drive to fit.

Handy I Ain't, so every time I do something new on a Mac it turns into a Little Adventure.  Last night I was telling my wife about the time some 30 very-odd years ago when I attempted to rebuild the carburetor on my girlfriend's Chevy.  I had no idea there were so many little parts inside one of those things...I would up taking the pieces to a mechanic, and shortly after that my girlfriend left, but presumably for other reasons...

[kps]

First, if it's a firewire enclosure, the drive MUST be set to MASTER.

The screws are machine screws and for the most part standard. They should go in straight and easily. Do not force them, keep trying until they "catch" and go in with minimal force...then tighten, but do not over-tighten.

In days of old, when carburators were still in use, I knew a mechanic (ney, a real craftsman) who did nothing else but rebuild them. His shop had many different acid baths to clean the parts based on the alloy used, some heated, some not...he knew all that just by looking at the metal, he had a sandblasting machine and knew on which metal parts to use it and on which not to, he had shelves upon shelves of parts and gasket kits and knew which ones to use on what model and make of carb.... it seems simple and easy, until we see an expert do it.

[Mayo]

Okaaay...Here's hoping that I am not experiencing a replay of my 7300 G3 upgrade debacle!

First, with the help of my Lovely Wife, we ascertained that there are no threads in the case holes, and the screws sure look like self-tapping screws to us, so that is how we approached it and it seemed to have worked.  The two screws for attaching the top of the case look like machine screws.

Setting the jumper top Master prevented the drive from being seen my Disk Utility.  So back out of the case it came and I set the jumper to Single, as recommended by the enclosure manufacturer.

Perhaps I should mention at this point that this is a dual Firewire/USB 2.0 enclosure...

So I get Disk Utility going and Voila! the drive appears... So I selected a partitioning scheme and let DU go to work installing the drivers and partitioning the drive.  After ten-twenty seconds I got an error message stating that partitioning was not successful and that an "unknown error -20" had occured.  Two attempts and I got the same result both times.

The enclosure instructions say to set the jumper setting to Single, or Master/Cable Select, but not Master With Slave.

The drive instructions state that the drive must be set to Slave because the drive in my iBook is already designated as Master.  I suppose that I will try the slave setting and see what happens...

Nope, no good.  The drive does not appear when the jumper is set to Slave.

[kps]

I originally thought you were referring to the screws that mount the drive and not the enclosure case itself. Those are industry standard.

I have two firewire cases I put together myself and both drives must be set to master. Both enclosure manuals specifically state the "must" part. With a USB/FW enclosure, I'd think Master/cable select should work.
But tell me, are you using it as FW or USB when you try to partition it?

Setting it to slave is only relevant when both drives are on a single bus with the dual ribbon cable in use as in most internal configurations.

[Mayo]

I'm using it as FW.  I only have USB 1.0 available on my iBook and iMac.  One thought I had was perhaps the OS 9 driver install was screwing things up, since the OS 9 driver might not support drives as large as 200GB.

Master(Dual) and Cable Select do not work.  A small piece of paper that came inside the enclosure box said to configure it to Single mode, or to Master/Cable Select if Single is not available.  But in the Mac FAQ  says the "jumper on the hard drive should be set to Master but Cable Select can also be used."

The instructions for Macs that came with the drive only refer to installations inside a PowerMac, and not in external enclosures.

[Mayo]

An update...

Apparently the correct combination is a jumper setting of Single device mode and NO OS 9 drivers.  Partitioning went without a hitch.

Then I began playing around with Panther's Restore function in Disk Utility.  My first try at copying the OS X volume on my iBook resulted in at least one error code.  So I ran Disk Utility and repaired both volumes on the external drive.  

I am currently doing the restore, but it is taking what seems like a very long time to copy 2.5GB of data.  The Disk Utility window is grayed-out, so I assume that SOMETHING is happening...  

Nope!  I finally quit Disk Utility after 1:20 and nothing had been copied. Dragging a folder to the external drive icon copied it quickly; at first I thought that I was having problems with that but my problem was related to trying to copy folders in DragThing docks.

Any ideas why restore didn't work?

[kelly]

Haven't tried or heard of anyone using Restore yet.

FWIW. My Hard Drive is Master in my Firewire Case.

http://www.techsurvivors.net/forums/index....t=ST&f=1&t=4451

Don't confuse Hard Drive internal install directions with external install.

What model case is it?

[Mayo]

This is the one.  As noted earlier, there are conflicting instructions regarding the case.  All I can say is it works after I configured the drive as a Single.

Tomorrow I will call Compucable tech support and see what their take is on the situation, and I'll report back with what they have to say...

[Paddy]

One other thing to note - Western Digital drives have slightly different jumper settings than the rest of the commonly used drives. Single is the setting to use when you have only one drive on the bus. Master is the setting that you use when there is another drive (set to Slave) for WD drives. With other manufacturers, there generally is no "Single" jumper setting - either the drive is Master, with or without a Slave, or it's Slave (and something else is Master).

So, since it's the only drive on the FW bus, it should be set to "Single" - at least that would be my guess.

I'd try Carbon Copy Cloner if I were you. There are a number of problems with Restore noted in this MacOSX Hints thread:

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?sto...031030154346917

(Read the entire thread - the problems aren't noted until part way down)

[Mayo]

Thanks for the link Paddy. Me thinks I will avoid Restore until the bugs have been eliminated...

[Mayo]

I tried to use CCC this morning and it stalled after a few seconds.  Here is the log info:

Error while copying Applications to the target
Can't locate MacOSX/File.pm in @INC (@INC contains: /System/Library/Perl/5.8.1/darwin-thread-multi-2level /System/Library/Perl/5.8.1 /Library/Perl/5.8.1/darwin-thread-multi-2level /Library/Perl/5.8.1 /Library/Perl /Network/Library/Perl/5.8.1/darwin-thread-multi-2level /Network/Library/Perl/5.8.1 /Network/Library/Perl .) at /usr/local/bin/psync line 14.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /usr/local/bin/psync line 14.

I let CCC install psync because I would like to synchronize my OS X volumes, but during the cloning process I got a window telling me that psync isn't compatible with Panther and to turn-off the synchronization feature in CCC's preferences, which I did.