--- On Thu, 6/3/10, JDW <[email protected]> wrote:
> There is a 4GB limit on 7.5.0, true. But the limit was raised in
> 7.5.2:
>
> http://support.apple.com/kb/TA28860
>
> And this is another reason my previous post recommended
> formatting on
> a newer SCSI Mac, which most likely would be running some
> flavor of OS
> 8 or even OS 9, definitely ensuring no large volume ceiling
> would get
> in the way of formatting the 9GB drive.
Be sure to format it HFS Standard, not HFS Extended. HFS Standard volumes over
2 gig get terribly inefficient. That's limited to 65,536 allocation blocks
(64K). At 2 gig each block is 32K, go up to 4 gig and they're 64K. For an 8 gig
volume the block size would be 128K. If 16K block size increase per gig of
volume size is true, then the block size should be 144K on a 9 gig volume.
That's a ton of space wasted on a typical hard drive. Good reason why Microsoft
limited FAT16 (which has the same basic underlying structure as HFS) to 2 gig
volumes.
One possibility for formatting a SCSI drive that just will not format on a Mac
is to use a PC with a SCSI controller that has its own bootable BIOS.
Low level format the drive with the PC SCSI controller, then boot with a DOS
floppy that has FDISK and FORMAT on it. Use FDISK to partition the drive then
reboot and FORMAT the partitions as FAT16.
Next, connect the drive to your Mac, properly terminated and SCSI ID set. When
it boots the Mac should offer to initialize the volume(s) on the drive or if it
has the extension for supporting DOS floppies and FAT16 formatted media it'll
mount the hard drive on the desktop. Then you can use the menu command to Erase
the DOS hard drive and select HFS.
I used that many times as a workaround to Mac format hard drives that Apple's
hard drive utilities wouldn't work on. It also worked on some drives that FWB's
Hard Disk Toolkit did something weird to when a RAID setup went bad. No utility
from Apple or anyone else would touch those drives on a Mac until I low level
formatted them with an Adaptec 2940 SCSI controller.
Adaptec is the best on the PC for SCSI. Plain model 2940 narrow SCSI
controllers can usually be found very cheap on eBay. If all you'll be doing
with it is low level formatting, you just need any PC motherboard with PCI
slots, a video card (if not built into the motherboard), a power supply,
keyboard and monitor and floppy drive. No operating system or hard drive other
than the one you'll be formatting. You'll only need the floppy drive and a DOS
bootable floppy with FDISK and FORMAT if you're going to do the FAT16
workaround for drives Apple's utility won't work on.
The same trick works using FAT32 then erasing/initializing to HFS+.
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