how to reformat PC SCSI drive to Mac

We have a PowerMac 8600/200 machine which we would like to give to someone, but it only had a small drive, and he needs a reasonable size for all his 'stuff', so we got a couple of SCSI 4.3 Gb drives from eBay,50 pin narrow but I have not been able to initialise either of them as the machine reckons they are not supported.
At first I thought it must be that we had got the wrong drives as they are labelled Western Digital Enterprise 4360 Ultrafast SCSI interface-3, and our machine is 'standard' or 'fast' scsi - but then I think, why would it be a matching connection if it isn't meant to go in a 50-pin block?

Then we discovered that Drive Setup that comes with OS 9 will not work with non-Apple drives, so I have downloaded Mt Everything and tried that.

That tells me that both drives are DOS-mapped and so are for PC's.

What do I do now? All help appreciated.

You'll have to use a third-party disk utility like Hard Disk Toolkit (either the full or PE edition) from FWB: http://www.fwb.com/html/solutions_from_fwb.html. Unfortunately they are not inexpensive, especially for a one-off project.

Badger said:

You'll have to use a third-party disk utility like Hard Disk Toolkit (either the full or PE edition) from FWB: http://www.fwb.com/html/solutions_from_fwb.html. Unfortunately they are not inexpensive, especially for a one-off project.

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Is there no other option?

This is a one-off, just to help someone out, and we are on pensions, so forking out a lot of money is not top of the list. I have looked for some more drives on eBay, but 50 pin narrow 4.3 Gb's are a bit thin on the ground it seems.

Thank you for your advice Badger

Back when scsi macs were standard, third-party drives usually came with some kind of utility precisely because of this problem. You don't have to use FWB but you'll need some kind of formatting utility. You can check the on-line archives such as Version Tracker, Mac Update or Pure-Mac to see if there is something else available. The other possibility is to find a used Apple scsi hard disk; that would work with Apple's utilities. Or you might check for a Mac club/user group in your area. Someone there might be able to help you out.

Badger said:

Back when scsi macs were standard, third-party drives usually came with some kind of utility precisely because of this problem. You don't have to use FWB but you'll need some kind of formatting utility. You can check the on-line archives such as Version Tracker, Mac Update or Pure-Mac to see if there is something else available. The other possibility is to find a used Apple scsi hard disk; that would work with Apple's utilities. Or you might check for a Mac club/user group in your area. Someone there might be able to help you out.

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thank you Badger - you have encouraged me. I shall look around

Find a friend that has a SCSI controller in their wintel PC and do a low level format on the drive. Then you should be able to initialise it with the mac software.

ed724

ed724 said:

Find a friend that has a SCSI controller in their wintel PC and do a low level format on the drive. Then you should be able to initialise it with the mac software.

ed724

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hi ed, I attached the drive to a PC via an old adaptec scsi card in the ISA slot. I ran a bootup floppy so that would load a scsi driver (for the cd-rom really of course). I didn't expectthe machine to see the drive, and it didn't. Then I let the machine run on its own HDD and load windows and checked in device manager and found the scsi controller loaded there - but no scsi disk icon appeared - that is as far as I can take it thataways I feel,so getting the disk toolkit seems to be the next option. I keep looking for 4Gb-ish scsi drives on eBay but 50 pin narrow are like hens teeth it seems.

thank you again