ORB extension causes problems?: a follow-up

Regarding the function of the Orb driver/extension (as questioned in a MacFixIt item last time), Joseph Cotton writes:

If an Orb disk is formatted as a Mac disk, then it will have a Mac driver on it. If the disk is in the drive when the computer is started up, then the computer will load the driver from the disk rather than use the extension from your normal startup drive. That's why the disk can mount even without the extension installed. However, I would wager that if you started up with no ORB disk in the drive and without the ORB extension enabled, and you inserted an ORB disk after startup, it would not mount. (The driver on the disk is also what allows a person to boot from the disk before it loads the ORB extension.)

PC formatted drives also have this driver partition, but do not usually include the Mac driver. That's why these require the ORB extension to mount (or have a Mac formatted disk mount at startup, then switch to the PC disk).

Without the extension, the ORB also appears as a a non-removable device. This is why, when the extension doesn't load, you have to push the Eject button to remove an unmounted disk. With the extension loaded, the disk will eject automatically when unmounted.

Update: David Snedigar replies: "I'd just like to say that while logical, this is not the case. My PC-reformatted Orb disks mount fine without the drive after the system has started up and I insert them into the drive. Now, as to the reason for this, it might have something to do with me formatting them with HDT and HDT acting as the driver on the system in place of the ORB driver. I would suspect systems running Silverlining, etc., would have the same results."

Regarding the reported "random and unexplainable problems" when trying to reformat a PC-formatted ORB disk to a Mac format (also mentioned in the report last time), Castlewood Tech Support told Justin Brown to temporarily disable the File Exchange control panel. Justin tried it and it worked: "You just pop in the disk an the 'This disk is unreadable... do you want to format it?' message appears. You can now format the disk."

Update: David Snedigar notes (as covered in the MacFixIt Report "Formatting Your Drive"), the Finder's Erase Disk command does not do a low (or even exactly a high) level format - and thus using it to reformat a PC-formatted disk may not be a good idea: "That is why people that are doing a Finder Erase are having errors, because the disk is still fundamentally a PC disk, 'hacked' into working on a Mac."