Hard Drive Compatibility

I wouldn't count it on bing usable with the Drive Setup utility. MAYBE a patched copy, though.

If it were up to me I'd use CF cards, they are more standard, faster in some cases, and come in larger sizes. CF is actually ATA based, so adapters from CF to IDE cost next to nothing. you cna even get them made up to fit straight to a laptop 44-pin (female) IDE header.

That dohicky will likely work but you'll need to somehow adapt it from 40-pin to 44-pin IDE. that'd cost almost as much as buying a CF->IDE adapter.

You'd have to buy a industrial-grade CompactFlash card, however.

There is a few problems with using a CF card adapter in the 150. I don't know why. Though this should act as a normal hard drive. There is a 44 pin version. I will find that.

EDIT: If I do get a 44 Pin version, will I be able to initialize it with the built in drive setup? Would there be a utility I could squeeze onto the PowerBook 150's Utilites floppy (After deleting everything not related to booting)?

You'd have to buy a industrial-grade CompactFlash card, however.

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Well, you don't have to, but they would certainly last longer. From what people have been saying around here, a CF card that supports UDMA should be bootable.

However, as you'll see here, putting one in a 150 has a couple of wrinkles.

However, industrial-grade CF cards contain "Fixed Disk Mode" which bypasses the need to do what the author of the article did.

So would the 44 pin drive that I posted work? It seems that it should act like a normal every day hard drive as the disk is fixed, so like JRL said will bypass the things that that user had to go through. I also need a recommendation on a formatting program for it too. I have heard of Silverlining, but don't know where I can get it for System 7.1 (What is on the utilities disk for the PowerBook I have). Would I be able to format it in my PC if I connected it to a USB to IDE adapter with the right number of pins and have it recognized by the PowerBook?

I have a copy of Silverlining, but it typically won't work well with IDE HDDs.

Hmm, is there a way to patch the drive setup to read any disk? I saw a site that involved ResEdit and you could add the name, but is there a way to just to make it work with anything?

EDIT: http://lowendmac.com/sable/07/mac-drive-setup-patch.html

I bet I could get this to work.

Yeah, it's really easy; you'd just have to use 7.5 and above to do an install.

I will use HD SC Setup as I think I can make it run on the Utilites floppy that comes with system enabler for the Powerbook. I also will have more room to work with than say, the network access disk.

You can't use HD SC Setup, as it is designed to be used for SCSI drives only.

The versions of Drive Setup that come with later versions of Mac OS (8.1 onwards) can format most 3rd party drives in my experience.

Would I be able to format it in my PC if I connected it to a USB to IDE adapter with the right number of pins and have it recognized by the PowerBook?

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As long as you manage to put a standard HFS file system onto the disk it might work. Most PC disk utility software will not offer that option. You might try to find any Mac with a CF card reader / adapter and use a more recent version of the Mac's Disk Utility to make a HFS partition with classic driver. This works not with any disk or any old mac, but I was successful with this method several times.

Apple HD SC Setup can work with IDE drives, as it is on the Utilites floppy that came with my PowerBook. I was thinking about formatting it with Transmac as that works pretty well for the things I used it for (Emulation and looking at the backup of my iMac I made in disk copy), though I might try some things before I go out and buy a 40 to 44 pin IDE cable (Cheap one here that I might try http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.727 ).

I thought that the "SC" in HD SC Setup specifically referred to SCSI. But perhaps not?

AFAIK, it most certainly does, hence why Apple used "SC" in the names of the SCSI HDDs they used to sell.

I saw something about the name. It must have been something like the first SCSI hard drive that Apple made came with the utility, but when it became more popular and it support more devices, the name stayed. I think it was the SC20 hard drive (I could be wrong).

Then why does it mention in an Apple Tech article that HD SC Setup is not compatible with the PowerBook 150? I seem to renember that HD SC Setup would throw up "no SCSI devices found on SCSI bus" when used on my PB 150 (when it was still booting)

Did you use the one on the Utilities disk, version 7.5.3 (The version of HD SC Setup), or an older version?

I used the latest version. It's probably there because 7.5.3 isn't the original OS for the PowerBook 150.

I just found they are both not compatible... Though the drive is in ROM so I can still initialize it and it should work according to http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=19644 . Though it confuses me. If it has a driver partition, it can't be formatted, yet it tells you that when you start up with a boot disk you can initialize it... Am I not understanding something?

That article is telling you only that the driver resides in ROM. That does not mean that you cannot format or otherwise install the drive. It just means that you need a special formatting tool (Internal HD Format) to prepare the drive correctly. As the article says, use of other formatting tools will inevitably result in a driver being installed on the drive, preventing Internal HD Format from doing its thing, and thus preventing the PB150 from using the drive.

Installation of a driver is not the same as initialization or formatting. These are separate operations.

Apple has an Internal HD Format download somewhere.

That article is telling you only that the driver resides in ROM. That does not mean that you cannot format or otherwise install the drive. It just means that you need a special formatting tool (Internal HD Format) to prepare the drive correctly. As the article says, use of other formatting tools will inevitably result in a driver being installed on the drive, preventing Internal HD Format from doing its thing, and thus preventing the PB150 from using the drive.

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The PowerBook 150 was the first to incorporate the IDE bus architecture, at least in a portable. At about the same time the Quadra 630 was introduced with the first desktop IDE bus. Did it suffer the same problem? Was this just Apple's early implementation of IDE to get the machines out the door on schedule?

EDIT – Looks like it was – http://68kmla.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=48417#48417 And here's the setup utility. And Startup Disk.

I would guess that even though the IDE bus made the drives less expensive, the requirement to use Apple's unique formatting tool would restrict the number of compatible drives.

I am not aware of the LC 580 or PowerMac x200 series which debuted almost a year later having any drive formatting problems.

Was this just a PB 150 problem? In which case it's another strike against that poor PowerBook. Definitely an odd bird. They make it almost impossible to use it as a desktop replacement by removing the ADB port and second serial port, then, even though they had to burn a new ROM to utilize the IDE bus, they don't add SCSI disk mode code to it, which would make it a perfect companion for use with a desktop. They add a more expensive 640x480 LCD, but limit it to 2-bit grayscale which most applications that needed 640x480 probably couldn't use. Odd.

So I should be able to make it work if I don't touch it with anything other than Internal HD Format? If so, it is good to know and will be done as soon as I have some cash that is not going toward my PC (Lots of upgrades to make it able to play the latest games).

Was this just a PB 150 problem? In which case it's another strike against that poor PowerBook. Definitely an odd bird. They make it almost impossible to use it as a desktop replacement by removing the ADB port and second serial port, then, even though they had to burn a new ROM to utilize the IDE bus, they don't add SCSI disk mode code to it, which would make it a perfect companion for use with a desktop. They add a more expensive 640x480 LCD, but limit it to 2-bit grayscale which most applications that needed 640x480 probably couldn't use. Odd.

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The 150 definitely has several strikes against it. I think your speculation about how the need for Internal HD Format could limit the number of drive options is probably spot on. I've never tried any extensive experiments to assess compatibility with more modern drives, so the question remains open. But given the other oddities of the 150, it wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that it will only work with certain drives made in a certain country on a certain day of the week. Except in leap years.