Syquest EZ135 drives and Amigas...

[outlawal2]

OK, so I picked up a SCSI Syquest 135 drive and hooked it up to my Amiga but it doesn't recognize it as anything other than "Unknown"... So do any of you gurus use a Syquest drive with your Amiga? Is there a specific driver or do I need all of the drive parameters, cylinders, etc.. To set it up manually. (And of course if this is the case do you have the necessary info so I can set it up manually?)



Thanks guys...

[motrucker]

I used to use one with my old X-A1200. You just have to format the cartridge like any other hard drive. I don't remember doing anything more - The Amiga found all of the needed setting for formatting it.
Be careful what you name the cartridges, if you want to use more than one at a sitting.
I used this with an A1200, and Squirrel SCSI interface. Worked great for years.

[Jope]

Yeah, basically you can either partition all your cartridges the same with HDToolBox, OR you can create a mountlist for the drive and work with them that way.

If you had to ask, then opt for the mountlist. If you create RDBs on them with HDToolBox, you really need to know what you are doing, as if you insert cartridges with different RDBs in without a reboot in between, you sometimes end up with interesting results.

[outlawal2]

I used to use one with my old X-A1200. You just have to format the cartridge like any other hard drive. I don't remember doing anything more - The Amiga found all of the needed setting for formatting it.
Be careful what you name the cartridges, if you want to use more than one at a sitting.
I used this with an A1200, and Squirrel SCSI interface. Worked great for years.

Hmmmm..  When I try to use HDToolbox it finds the drive but cannot determine the size of the disk and then when I try to format it never completes the format job and I have to shutdown and restart the machine..  I can't tell if this is a problem with the media or with HDToolbox....

[Matt_H]

Hmmmm..  When I try to use HDToolbox it finds the drive but cannot determine the size of the disk and then when I try to format it never completes the format job and I have to shutdown and restart the machine..  I can't tell if this is a problem with the media or with HDToolbox....

I remember SyQuest cartridges having an absurdly high defect rate - probably 1 in 4 of mine croaked right out of the shrinkwrap. Got any other cartridges to try?

[outlawal2]

I remember SyQuest cartridges having an absurdly high defect rate - probably 1 in 4 of mine croaked right out of the shrinkwrap. Got any other cartridges to try?

Nope, I only have the one...   (That seems like a really high fail rate. I had this type drive when they first came out and I never had any issues with it.  I only had 3 cartridges, but no issues.  I must have been lucky!)

Eventually I will try another cartridge but right now so close to Xmas I better hold off...
Thanks for the tip though.  If I DO get this thing running I will update this thread and let you guys know.

Thanks!

[Nostalgiac]

at work we used the original 40 & 80mb syquests and we all loved them.
Then syquest came with newer/bigger models... and we could not trust them for more then 2 days at a time if that much... crashing left right and center.... completely useless + absolutely unreliable no matter how many replacements our vendor send us. We ended up just tossing all the drives/disks into the bin.

Tom Uk

[motrucker]

There was a huge problem with the media for a while. It's easy to tell the good from the bad however. They made a el-cheapo cart. without a metal hub (just plastic). The better ones have metal hubs - these can be trusted.
I used to use the Squirrel version of HDToolbox, but I can't imagine why that would make a difference.
So, check your cartridge and see what you have....

[elginseam]

I dug this out from an old archive of mine.
Add a file in Devs/DOSDrivers with this content:

/* mountlist for ez135 with amiga format */

   Device = omniscsi.device
   FileSystem = L:FastFileSystem
   Unit = 5
   Flags = 0
   Surfaces = 1
   BlocksPerTrack = 64
   Reserved = 2
   Interleave = 0
   LowCyl = 1
   HighCyl = 4095
   Buffers = 32
   GlobVec = -1
   BufMemType = 4
   Mask = 0xfffffffe
   MaxTransfer = 0x7fffffff
   Mount = 1
   DosType = 0x444f5301
   StackSize = 4000
#

Change the device line to suit your SCSI device and the unit number to be the same as the number on the back of your EZ135.
It worked for me.