Has anyone ever tried to use an external Iomega Jaz drive on a next machine. I have quite a few of these, and the associated cartridges, that I could try. This came up because I noticed that deadstart.net's disktab list has an entry for the Jaz drive. This would give me a 1GB disk to use instead of the 200-800M disks I currently have.
Thoughts anyone?
I've not done it personally, but a freind of mine has booted a Twinhead 5 (SparcStation 5 clone) and a PA RISC 712 both of Iomega ZIP drives using NS 3.3 so I guess a Jaz should work on a NeXT.
Now that I have gotten the drive in my ColorTurbo cloned successfully, I am going to try the procedure on the Jaz drive to see how it goes. My thought is to have a cartridge for each different OS, so I can just switch it out if I want to run NS or OS. The only issue I see would be with the 1G size of the cartridge, as it might be a little tight for a full OS4.2 install /w developer stuff. This could also allow me to have some loads that I can test out things on, and If I fubar it up, I can just wipe the disk and lay down a fresh version without having to resort to a reinstall.
Well that is the plan, at least.
Chef
I had a Jaz on my Color Station. I remember it working very well - speedy, easy to use, etc.
There used to be a FAQ for Jaz drives, but I'm not finding it.. This might be helpful:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.next.sysadmin/browse_thread/thread/cfa4c19d99f31184/8fc37829c93d5ae1?lnk=st&q=&rnum=10&hl=en#8fc37829c93d5ae1
Looks like the dump/restore cloning procedure works for the jaz drive as well. I followed my own guide to clone the 540M drive in my Color station (non turbo), and was able to boot from it on both the Color and ColorTurbo. It is definitely slower than the 7200rpm seagate, but about the same as the original internal drive.
One more of my "I wonder if" questions answered.
I do have a 1.5G SyJet I could try .. ;)
Chef
No luck trying to install directly to the Jaz drive using my NS3.3 cd. It gives errors about the front porch settings when trying to initialize the drive, and setup will not continue. I guess the install cd can not handle the format, so it is possible to run the install in a way to have it skip the disk init step? I tried formatting the jaz cartridge, and copying the boot blocks to it, before rebooting from the install cd, but it still tries to initialize the disk during setup. I will try an OS4.2 cd, to see if it has better support.
Chef
I have used these with everything from NS 3.0 to OpenStep on a cube. Has anyone ever got the *internal* Jax drive working with a cube?