Small (hope not big?!) problem with new scsi hard drive

[English Billy1]

Hey guys!
Having lots of fun recording with my mx, but of course my small internal 9Gb hdd is 90% full so.. naturally, I sought a refurbed, but affordable drive: a Seagate 50 gb (yes, I know.. odd size!) scsi drive and I have built up an external enclosure with the single hdd inside.
I am encountering a problem slightly different to any I read on the forum, I thought I better research a little before posting.. now, in this case I set the jumper on the drive to call it drive '2'.. with the new external powered up I booted up my mx and yay..! the new scsi drive was recognised and immediately humped, er.. I mean mounted. (The mx shows two drives in the setup menu: 0, 2 ) So far so good, next I read the format instructions again and it asks the user to unmount the drives: I did this, noticing curiously that the mx told me ''one drive unmounted'' - when I attempted a low level format - 710 I think that is, the mx tells me ''no device'' and errors.. I'm crossing everything that this refurbed drive isn't one that the mx won't play nicely with..?! I'm hoping that there is a work-around because the mx recognises and mounts this Seagate st150176LW initially - the problem is to format it.. I do know that these refurbished hdds are clean, but they have a low level format I believe, so maybe thats the issue here..?
Any ideas to crack this case lads? Billy

 

[witzendoz]

First up Billy, be really careful that you don't low level format the wrong drive, or all of your work will be gone. If possible would disconnect the 9gig drive with your work, I always only ever connect the drive I am low level formatting.

No if the MX sees the drive when booting up with the drive connected, thats a good sign, it is seeing it as a scsi device at this stage only. Yes, you do have to unmount the drive to low level format, the reason the MX may have said that only 1 drive was unmounted when 2 were connected is possibly due to the drive not being recognised as a drive at this stage.

The problem with the low level formatting may be due to the drive being an odd size, i'm guessing about that. Also when you tried to format the drive, you did select scsi 2 as the device to format? Try doing it again, if there is an error, what error is coming up?

Can you connect the scsi drive to a PC? I have a scsi card in my PC so that I can connect the scsi tower to a computer to suss out problems, if you can, you can format the drive on a PC to FAT32, then connect the drive back up to the MX and initialise the drive.

Alan.

 

[English Billy1]

Hi Alan, thanks for reading my post: yes, I was uber-careful not to LLF my 9gb internal hdd containing my entire new album.. ;-) I stayed calm, and was more concerned about an eventual result, than a five minute fix.. The drive I attempted to LLF was scsi '2' but the error msg was 'no device..' or somesuch.. I have found a scsi card I can fit to my pc - the pc I use (for mxview only..) is a P3 running xp. This is my only pc and Im sure as hell going to make sure this scsi adapter card fits my motherboard! I read deep within the Seagate Documentation that the st150176 can be formatted to any chosen capacity as long as it's less than the max, of course. I figure to pre-emp trouble I could try a LLF from my pc and set the capacity to 37 gb..? My 9gb scsi '0' drive is formatted for Mac.. hsf+ or similar.. but I think I will format the new drive FAT32..

 

[witzendoz]

I believe that when the drive is formatted to hsf+ the files are recorded as aaf files, if the drive is formatted to FAT32 they record in broadcast wav (b-wav) files, I always prefer wav as they seem to be more compatible with other audio DAW's, some actually recognise b-wav files and place them in the correct location in the project. I also believe that if you copy a aaf file from a hfs+ drive to a Fat32 drive the audio is converted from aaf to b-wav but I have never tried this.

Alan.