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.

Click to expand...

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.