Bad news -- Last June the Imation SuperDisk drive I had on the
Macintosh G3 died. No icon on the desktop, in either the G3 or the
Powerbook, but when a disk was inserted otherwise seems to work
normally. I called Imation described the behavior and was told that
they don't repair these units and that I would have to buy a new unit.
Bummer.
I am a pack-rat. So I replaced the unit and set the old one aside
thinking some day I might take it apart for laughs to see what was
inside. I figured it probably was something simple like a bad
connector or cable.
This past weekend was cleanup and I came across the bad unit and
decided to toss it, and then decided to donate it to the kid's school
to let them disassemble/explore/play with it.
I was exploring a new site this weekend -- http://www.macfixit.com/
a very useful place -- this weekend and found a reference by someone
who appeared to have had similar problems with one of these and got the
company to provide a replacement cable which solved his problem. So
I e-mailed the company and described the problem. Their reply was to
check the Mac system extensions: there are some that are required, and
some that should be deleted. Thinking back about when the problem
occurred, it was sometime after I transitioned from Mac OS 8.6 to 9.0,
a big hint that I completely overlooked last year!
Good news -- So last night I fired up the lap top (Sys 9.0.4),
duplicated the extension file and deleted the identified extensions,
plugged the SuperDisk USB drive in, popped a disk into it and Ta DAH!!
A disk icon on the desktop! Now I have two operating USB SuperDisk
drives.
What aggravates me is that Imation could have told me this _before_
telling me the unit was bad and to go buy a replacement! So I share
this with you and hope you learn from my experience.
Harvey Chao
The box said "Requires Windows 95, or better" so I bought a Macintosh.
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