With the advent of System 7, we realized there would be a need for a formatter that could update most third party drivers. There are a lot of installations that have a mixed driver environment. Many suppliers have been very slow to come out with a fully 7.0-compatible (virtual memory and 32-bit addressing) driver. We wanted to provide users with one affordable product that will do that for most, if not all, of their drives. Using Drive7 also gives them a solid, single upgrade path for future Apple systems.
Also, many drivers (and some drives) just plain do not conform to Apple╒s SCSI guidelines. Drive7 was designed to follow Apple╒s guidelines as closely as possible. We have also written special code to make allowances for some third party formatters and drives.
Another major reason for this is the future. Even with some other ╘7.0 compatible╒ formatters, users could have to reformat later. We intend to spare users that frustration. For example, we╒ve tested Drive7 on the new (reported) 040 Macs, and it (reportedly) worked perfectly with 7.0.1.
Recent Recognitions:
Ñ Three Stars, and preferred choice, by Macworld Magazine, 1/93.
Ñ Four Mice, and preferred choice, by MacUser, 2/93;
Ñ Four Diamonds, and Best Overall Value, MacWeek (10/26/92);
Ñ Fall, 1992 CRN Star Search Finalist, and one of only four Macintosh products;
Ñ BMUG Choice Product Fall ╘92 and Spring ╘93;
Ñ #4-Rated Utility, and the #1-selling formatter by MacLife (Japan), 2/93.
Features:
Updates over a dozen third-party drivers, including Apple, Mirror, Micronet, PLI, Disk Manager, CRU, Alliance, Total Peripherals, SilverLining, STI, Storage Dimensions, Cutting Edge, and others. Drive7 can take over any of those drivers, allowing you to update without initializing or formatting. For those drivers that are close, but not fully in compliance with Apple╒s specs, Drive7 allows an Update (with a warning), but without partitioning features. Drive7 intelligently figures out this for you. If it is doable, the Update button is available; if not, the button is greyed out. We know of no other formatter that provides the universality of Drive7, especially at an affordable price.
Drive7 will format any drive that conforms to Apple╒s current SCSI guidelines. These include Quantum, Micropolis, Conner, Fujitsu, Maxtor, Seagate, and others. Drives it will not format include DataFrames, ProApp, and some older rare others that have proprietary ROMs which will recognize only their software.
Drive7 allows you to format and initialize for Mac as well as A/UX partitioning. You have a number of choices for partitions, including 1,2,4 and 8 Mac OS. Drive7 also ╘learns╒ the existing partition scheme on your drive, remembers it, and adds it to the list of choices.
Partitioning features include Mount/AutoMount, Lock/Unlock, and Password Protection. Most of these are controlled thru the application. You can use SCSI Probe for mounting partitions not designated as AutoMount. Education and government installations have a particular need for the lock/unlock and password protection, and Drive7 allows those features to be changed only within the software.
Drive7 has an extremely simple and intuitive interface. Four buttons on the main window. Four more on the extended features panel. If you want more, you can get into the partitioning window. The intent in this design was to make it as easy for the user as possible, and not to confuse them with features most don╒t need, use, or understand. (Casa Blanca is not trying to capture the hacker market. For hackers, we recommend FWB Toolkit.)
The ╥Test╙ button that tests and write out bad blocks. Because all Macs from the SE on include hardware handshaking in the Mac ROMs, Drive7 does blind writes automatically on those Macs. On the MacPlus, Drive7╒s special code does polled writes automatically. This has concerned some people until they learn that the handshaking is built into their Macs (SE and beyond) already and that the expected failure rate of most production drives is 10(-7).
Another special feature: A choice of 40 different hard drive icons. Plus, you can import any icon you want vis ResEdit. And under System7, you can copy and paste icons. In addition to the multiple icon choices, Drive7 allows you to optionally place the SCSI ID number (with the choice of two font sizes) on the icon.
Supports removeable drives, too. Successfully tested with opticals, 45 and 90 Bernoullis, Sony and Ricoh Opticals, and Syquest drives. You can format multiple Syquest and optical cartridges in one session.
Drive7 also includes a removeable INIT that will recognize virtually any formatted Syquest , Bernoulli, Optical cartridge as well as Apple and Toshiba CDROMs. In most cases, all that is required is to drop the INIT in the System folder. You need not reformat the cartridge.
You can also designate a Syquest, Bernoulli, and Optical cartridge as virtual memory under Drive7.