Odds & Ends: SoftRAID redux; Stealth and OS X; Grammarian serial number glitch; Dock Extras name change

More on SoftRAID and Mac OS X Regarding our previous coverage of SoftRAID and Mac OS X, a reader found that he could not mount external SCSI drive partitions, when running Mac OS 9, in drives that had been formatted with SoftRAID and previously mounted under Mac OS X. SoftRAID support replied: "OS X will write additional drivers onto those partitions. The problem comes if (1) you try to boot from them in Classic (you generally cannot any more) or (2) if you create a striped volume on those disks and install OS X onto a standard volume on one of them (OS X kills the striped volumes). Stay with standard volumes." Another reader had similar problems ("resulting from nothing more than installing OS X on a newly formatted drive") and "was advised to remove SoftRAID on that drive and use Drive Setup for now.

Stealth Serial Port and OS X A reader received this reply from GeeThree, regarding Stealth Serial Port and Mac OS X: "In Mac OS X, the Stealth provides the same functionality as a built-in serial port on a Beige G3. So if it works with a serial port on a Beige G3 running OS X, then it should work with a Stealth. External modems work by just configuring the modem port in the OS X Network System Preference. In the Classic environment, right now there is little serial support since it relies on OS X services to support these serial interfaces."

Grammarian 2 serial number re-entry Users who switch back and forth between Mac OS X and 9.x will have to re-enter their Grammarian 2 serial number each time the switch operating systems, if Grammarian 2 was launched in either Classic or Mac OS 9.x. Peter Naschke writes: "I was told by Casady & Greene that the reason for his is due to an OS X bug. The problem surfaces when applications use the Volume ID for serialization purposes." [We previously reported this same behavior with Conflict Catcher and OS X Public Beta, which has also been confirmed in an Apple TIL article (106149).]

Changing the name of Dock Extras folder Nabil Laoudji found that the docklings, such as iTunes Control, no longer worked when the name of the Dock Extras folder that contained them was changed. We did not find this exactly. However, we can confirm that, when we changed the name of the folder, logged out and back in, the dockling items from the folder no longer even appeared in the Dock. If we redragged them to the Dock, they reappeared and functioned normally. This is probably the same basic issue as what an Apple TIL article (106265) described for changing the name of the Utilities folder.