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<b>What's the deal with Drive Setup anyway?

<b>What's the deal with Drive Setup anyway?

CNET staff
2 min read
Drive Setup has had problems through several versions - especially with IDE drives. A look through the MacFixIt archives reveals some key examples:

February 97: Chris Heatherly (of Power Computing) wrote: "We have seen issues where customers who have updated their IDE driver with Drive Setup 1.2.2 (the version that ships with Mac OS 7.6) find that their IDE drive does not remount on restarts, often resulting in a flashing ?. Our initial tests indicate that reinitializing the drive with Drive Setup 1.1 resolves this issue. This is the only fix we have seen so far." The problem may affect all Mac OS machines with IDE drives, although they are not yet certain of this.

June 1997 -1 and -2: Drive Setup 1.2.4 is out. However, beware using this new version. When several readers updated their hard drive with Drive Setup 1.2.4, their hard drive would no longer mount. Instead, the blinking question mark appeared at startup. Apple now confirms that they have duplicated the problem in their labs. Most instances of the problem appear limited to "drives originally initialized using HD SC Setup 7.3.5."

August 1997: Jordan Ruderman (of UMAX) wrote: "Regarding Mac OS 8 and UMAX C500 and C600 computers: From our preliminary investigation, the "failure to start" problem appears to be with Drive Setup 1.3. This affects Alchemy based computers only."

Why can't Apple find a permanent solution to this clearly serious bug?

To be fair, other disk formatting utilities, such as HDT, have also had problems with IDE drives (see June item and Mac OS 8 item). And some blinking question mark startup problems seem related to hardware problems with specific, especially IDE, drives (see June item and Mac OS 8 item). Still, cleaning this up remains primarily Apple's responsibility.