Hi,
Please someone help if they can. I have an SyQuest EZ135 for my old Mac, scxi I think. I got a new PC running windows XP and need to run the drive to get the data off. I bought a scxi to USB adapter, NOW WHAT? Do I need a driver if so what should I use? Can someone tell me how to make this drive work on my new PC..

Thank you so much Please reply to

fgregory@ball.com

Hi Fred,

Getting the hardware together is quite easy. If your USB to SCSI Adapter is Belkin, you may be best off contacting their tech support line for assistance in getting the adapter to work with XP. I say this because some of their USB to SCSI adapters shipped with the wrong CD, and it doesn't install properly. Anyways, once the adapter is installed correctly, turn off the drive, unplug the adapter from the computer, plug the adapter into the drive (you may or may not have to use a terminator - I usually don't have to since the USB adapters are designed to be single ended - but the drive could get fickle), and then plug the adapter into your computer. WinXP should load the drivers for the adapter automatically, then detect that there is a SCSI device present. Here is where things are going to get sticky.

You mentioned that you used this drive on a Macintosh. By default, Mac drive formats (hard disks, removeable media other than floppy and CD) as HFS or HFS+ file system. WinXP can't read this file system. So, you are going to need a go-between for the drive and Windows XP. There are a few commercial products which can do this for you, or you can do the following:

1) Install a Macintosh Emulator into Windows XP. There are a few hoops to jump through, but if you own a 680xx based mac, this is a breeze. Check out http://www.uni-mainz.de/~bauec002/B2Main.html for more details. When you download the files, read the documentation carefully for any gotchas. When you get Basilisk running, you can then access the EZ135, copy the data to a local hard drive (formatted for windows / dos / whatever else is mounted), reformat the EZ135 for FAT16, etc.

2) Still go ahead and download the Basilisk files mentioned above. In the zip file, there is a little utility called "Gemulator" that allows you to move data from HFS drives to FAT/NTFS drives within Windows. Gemulator's user interface is a bit spartan, but it gets the job done.

Personally, I prefer to use Basilisk to address the multi-environment gotcha. It seems to be a lot faster, and much more reliable than using Gemulator. And besides, when using the MacOS, if you delete something important, you can always rescue it from the trash can. Gemulator cleans the file out, and there aint no utility in the world that can recover the file (under Mac or Windows) on a HFS drive after Gemulator has played with it. I suspect that gemulator destroys the A and B Leaves of the Drive Tree. And MOST IMPORTANTLY, it is so cool to have your mac startup while running windows, even down to the startup chime (and chimes of death if something went wrong). The hardest hing about installing Basilisk is getting the image of a ROM from a 68040 (preferable) machine.