Fix for PowerBook BlueSCSI & ZuluSCSI locking up after Mac OS "spins them down"

[3lectr1c]

There's been a bug in the BlueSCSI V2 and the ZuluSCSI of which the V2 is based that's been happening to a lot of PowerBook users where the OS will freeze when trying to "spin up" the drive. Basically, on PowerBooks, Mac OS will automatically spin the hard drive down after a few minutes to save on power - you can also do this manually from the control strip. For whatever reason, the aforementioned devices will lock up when Mac OS attempts to spin the drive back up. The lockup lasts for exactly 180 seconds, after which it unfreezes. This issue notably doesn't happen to everyone with these devices, but it happens to a lot of us.

jmacz on 68kmla.org recently did a deep dive into the issue and came up with a theory on why it was happening, then went ahead and created a custom Control Panel for System 7 that fixes the issue. I cannot state enough how insane this is, and how grateful I am for his hard work.

You can read more about the potential cause, and download the fix from this thread: https://68kmla.org/bb/index.php?thr...or-power-up-lock-up-issues.47822/#post-536772

I'm posting here both to help out anyone who's having the problem, and also to inform the BlueSCSI developers who are active here about it. I know @eric was already made aware of the issue a while back but was waiting on log files I never provided (sorry!) to look further into it. Hopefully this can help!

 

[eric]

Thanks to @Androda BlueSCSI hardware versions 2023.09a+ resolve this issue, but if this works it's great for older versions.

 

[Sideburn]

I found this a long time ago with my portable and then my pb180. It’s a timing issue when powering the BlueSCSI back up. I “fixed” it back then by jumping power from the floppy drive over to the BlueSCSI so when it wakes up it powers the BlueSCSI immediately before the machine tries to access the drive.

But yeah the newer models (Androda) have solved the issue.