Alert! Using HDT 2.0.6 to reformat (with multiple volumes) certain internal IDE drives may prevent further access to the driv

Rolf von Andrian reformatted the internal IDE drives of several Power Mac 4400 and Motorola 3000/180 machines - using FWB's Hard Disk Toolkit 2.0.6. Both models use Seagate ST31267A drives. He selected to make two partitions on each drive. After doing so, he tried to install system software on the drives from an external SCSI drive. However, the machines froze midway in each case. After this, he was unable to successfully start up the machines - even when using a bootable CD-ROM or floppy disk. The only way he could get the machines to boot was to disconnect the internal drive. Even then, the internal drives were not recognized if they were reconnected after startup. Similarly, trying to restart with the drive reconnected led to the return of a freeze at startup. There was no way he could find to regain use of the drive.

Rolf wrote to FWB Software's Technical Support and received the following reply: "We have only recently become aware of a problem, with a few IDE drives (incl. the Seagate ST31267A), in which partitioning them into multiple volumes results in exactly what you have seen. FWB is currently analyzing this problem and we hope to have a new device data file on our web site in the near future to resolve the issue. The most recent upload of the device data files (on June 10th) does not resolve the problem. Please check back periodically to for new information about this problem."