Enjoy your newfound freedom to use Apple’s HD SC Setup with any SCSI drive! Drive Setup
Now you can format any extra hard drives by hooking them up to your Mac or copy the patched version onto your boot disks.
It will unstuff into a simple application that updates your copy of HD SC Setup to work on any drive. Grab the latest version (7.5.3) of the program from Apple (link at end of article). HD SC Setup is easy to download and patch. This latest downloadable version is compatible back to System 7.1.2 on the NuBus Power Macs and up to 9.2.2 on the last Classic-booting eMacs. See Joerg Erdei’s Drive Setup FAQ for more information on why version 1.5 is the best Drive Setup for 680×0 Macs.įor Power Macs, I recommend Drive Setup 1.7.3 regardless of system software version. This version avoids a couple of nasty bugs present on 680×0 Macs in Drive Setup 1.6 and higher. When I updated from HD SC Setup to Drive Setup on my SE/30, my hard drive performance doubled! Using Drive Setup instead of HD SC Setup can increase speed under System 7.5, and it’s required for 7.6, 8.0, and 8.1. It is broadly compatible with these older System releases and is the tool they were designed to work with.įor 6800 Macs (like Mac II and Quadra models) running newer Systems from 7.5 up to 8.1, I recommend using Drive Setup 1.5. The best tool to use depends upon your Macintosh situation.įor all Macs running “old” System Software from 6.0.1 through 7.1.1, I recommend Apple HD SC Setup.
Drive Setup 1.7.3 does a fine enough job all the way up to Mac OS 9.2.2. There are a few versions of Drive Setup newer than 1.7.3, but they are not available for download, so we won’t worry about them. Two versions of Drive Setup are of current interest: 1.5 and 1.7.3. Apple HD SC Setup and Drive Setup coexisted until Mac OS 7.6, which dropped the older program. When the LC 630 shipped a few months later, its IDE hard disk also needed to be formatted with Drive Setup. When Macs started coming with internal hard drives, its audience broadened, but its name never changed.ĭrive Setup arose with the introduction of the first Power Macs in 1994. With these patches, it is possible – and it works great! Introducing the ToolsĪpple HD SC Setup (named for the first external SCSI hard drive for Macs, Apple’s 20 MB HD SC) is the venerable old standby. Wouldn’t it be great it we could just use the appropriate Apple tool with any hard drive? Also, while many have had good luck with third-party hard disk drivers, they’ve been a source of heartache for me. This is inconvenient (and may even be technically illegal).
Since we often upgrade our vintage Macs with more modern hard drives, we’ve been forced to use third-party hard disk drivers. Their biggest limitation is that they are only compatible with a hard drive that came stock in a Mac. They’re not as glamorous as FWB Hard Disk Toolkit or SoftRAID, but they’re dependable day-in and day-out computing companions.
With these patches and tips, you’ll never again need to use an unreliable, inconvenient third-party hard disk driver to format a hard drive for your Mac.Īpple HD SC Setup and Drive Setup are the standard tools that everyone has used to prepare vintage Macintosh hard drives.