MicroTek scanner drivers hose your boot drive!

Hoping an actual Apple person will read this and tell me how this should be handled. I've actually solved the problem with my own Mac, now I want to make sure the root cause is dealt with appropriately.
There is a hardware vendor, MicroTek, who makes scanners. I have one, model i700. The scanners seem to be good hardware with good features, but the software leaves lots to be desired--it's clunky, very un-Maclike, and fragile. Any minor problem or upgrade requires a ponderous cleanup of old files spread all over the system and a full reinstall.
I was hoping their latest software would improve things, so I downloaded version 7.61 from their website and did an install. Towards the end, when it was installing plug-ins (for PhotoShop, etc. I presume) my MacBook Pro gradually stopped responding and eventually ground to a halt. After waiting a long, long time for it to recover, I did a hard reset. Upon startup it just stuck at the grey screen with the spinning gear. Did some troubleshooting and couldn't recover, and since it was pretty similar to many a disk crash I've had, and AppleCare agreed, I sent it in for a new HD.
Since I still needed to do some scanning, I whipped out my backup PowerBook G4 and tried installing the same drivers. Boom. Same behavior. Now I have two dead machines, and it's pretty clear that the problem with the first one was NOT a bad drive after all but a driver install screwing up the OS. I reinstalled this Mac from scratch and tried again. Same thing. After a discussion with an incredulous support tech at MicroTek who was adamant that their software installer could do no such thing (and who eventually hung up on me), I did a search on these very forums and found a post from someone who had hosed their Mac by resetting permissions on their root filesystem.
So, I booted the Mac into single user mode (which worked) and checked out the filesystem. Sure enough--the entire directory tree from the root all the way down to the ScanMaker folder under Applications was set to the wrong owner, and permissions of 700, making the Mac incapable of accessing itself in order to boot. I fixed these up, and blam, it now boots fine. This behavior is reproducible every time. I've done it 5 or 6 times now on multiple Macs.
My question is this--how do I get the vendor to fix this problem? I've gotten around it myself, but this is a huge deal--anyone installing this thing is going to hose their boot volume and NOBODY is going to know how to fix it when it happens. Can Apple sanction these guys somehow, or do I need to slashdot them to embarrass them into it, or what?
Thanks for your input...
/mike

Same thing happened to me - after waiting almost a year for Microtek to update its software so I could use my scanner again, the installation hung and completely hosed my system. Luckily, before restarting I noticed that my hard drive had the international red slash "NO" through it, so at least I knew the problem was probably permission related.
Disk utility refused to even try to repair permissions (the underlying operation quit), and I was not completely comfortable with manually resetting the permissions in single-user mode. I was able to start up in target disk mode, and confirmed that my root (hard drive) permissions were set to Everyone->No access. I changed this to Everyone->Read Only and did NOT copy that to the enclosing folders. I figured this was reasonably safe, and did not require my knowing what all the permissions should be set to. I then restarted from the install disk and ran disk utility, and sure enough, it now had enough access to repair the rest of the permissions itself.
As for you larger question, publicize. I liked my scanner (Microtek ScanMaker 6000), but after a) waiting a year for a simple driver upgrade and then b) having that driver installation fail so catastrophically, I won't be buying any Microtek products any time soon (for home or work). And I certainly won't recommend Microtek scanners to anyone (unless I really don't like them).

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Changing Boot Drives and Keep Your Time Machine History

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Note: This is not for the faint of heart or technically challenged. It also requires a mild knowledge of unix or at least the ability to follow instructions TO THE LETTER! You will change the UUID from the Latest Backup in Time Machine from the "old" drive to the "new" drive thus tricking TM into thinking the new drive is the old drive and it will continue to do incremental backups of the new drive. The technique described below was originally developed under OS 10.5 (and posted on the MAC OS HINTS 10.5 blog but I have just used it under Snow Leopard. It might work for newer OSs but I haven't tried them. I actually did 2 things: 1) Installed a larger TM drive and 2) installed a SSD as a boot drive. I will post under a different title to provide information on installing a larger TM drive since putting that information here may be confusing.
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** How to change your boot (or any other) drive and get Time Machine to just pick up where it left off doing incremental backups and not do a full backup of the new drive:
1) Turn OFF Time Machine
2) Install the new drive
3) Clone the old drive to the new drive (in my case HDD -> SSD) using SuperDuper, CarbonCopyCloner or even Disk Utility
4) Make sure you have both xattr and fsaclctl commands installed
5) Open Terminal
6) Follow the instructions here:
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20090213071015789&query=time+machine +new+disc
Note: you may need to use the command switch "l" (the letter l) to see the ascii version of the UUID
sudo xattr -l com.apple.backupd.SnapshotVolumeUUID my_partition
Note: Unix uses spaces (white space) as delimiters and is always case sensitive so if you have spaces in the name of your drives, you MUST put the drive name in quotation marks:
if the drive name is: My HDD then to list the contents of the drive in Unix would use the command ls thus:
> ls "My HDD"
will list the contents of My HDD
(the command: > ls My HDD (without quotation marks) will produce an error - no such file or directory)
When you've followed the above procedure and turned Time Machine back on, the first time TM may warn you that the disc has been changed and "someone may be trying to trick your computer" into using the new drive. Answer: do the backup
I wish I could take credit for this brilliant technique but I just followed it and it worked for me. I also read the entire thread before starting.

The two drives are handled as separate drives, even if they have the same name.
In essence, the old backups are from a drive that's no longer connected; see #E3 in the Time Machine - Troubleshooting *User Tip,* also at the top of this forum.

Best way to upgrade internal boot drive

Hi all, I have a G4 dual 1gig with the standard 76 gig internal drive and Lacie 250gig external for my I Tunes library, photos, and video editing.
The internal drive is showing 33 out of 76 gig available. I know that ideally you should not have your boot drive filled more than 50%. My question is should I add another internal drive? Or get a bigger drive to use for the boot up?
How do I tell my Mac to recognize or use another drive for boot up purposes?
I'm relatively green at playing with start up preferences.
Thanks,
Ed

Hi, Ed!
You still have sufficient space on your startup drive to operate efficiently, unless you're working with two-hour video projects right on the startup drive, which can eat up over 30GB...
You can easily add additional ATA hard drives of any size to an MDD Mac. You can have up to four total. Shop around online for a large ATA drive and you'll find some good deals, especially when coupled with a rebate. The mass merchants like CompUSA, Best Buy, Circuit City, Tiger Direct, Fry's (outpost.com), Newegg, etc. have sales that generally change weekly. You want an ATA drive for hooking up natively to your logic board bus. (A SATA drive requires the addition of a controller card.) For shopping purposes, don't let terms like ATA,PATA, IDE, EIDE, Ultra ATA-133, or Ultra ATA-100 confuse you - consider them all interchangeable terms for buying a new drive. Just don't mistakenly get a SATA or SCSI drive.
I'd look for a 3.5" drive that runs at 7200 RPM and has an 8MB or 16MB buffer, as opposed to a 2MB buffer, which is slower. The four major brands are Seagate, Maxtor, Western Digital, and Hitachi, any of which should serve you well.
When you get the drive, set it to Cable Select (for an MDD or later Mac) and connect it to the second bus on your logic board, attaching it to the end connector of the ribbon cable. You might first check to insure that your current drive is now set to Cable Select, which is the standard setting which it was to have originally been set when it shipped from Apple.
After installation, reset PRAM and boot normally to your startup drive, launch Disk Utility, and initialize (fancy word for initial formatting) the drive using Mac OS Extended as the format. I'd recommend checking the box to install the OS 9 drivers even if you don't intend to use OS 9. You might also consider using the option to overwrite zeros to the drive when you first format it, which will map out any bad sectors which may be present and preclude their future use. This option takes a few hours, but is good insurance against potential data corruption.
After formatting, the drive icon will appear on your desktop along with your startup drive (just like the external one does when mounted).
If you load an OS on a second drive, you have a choice of drives to boot from. You can easily select or change the default startup volume by selecting it in the Startup pane of System Preferences. Alternately, you can boot to the Startup Manager by holding down the option key at startup, selecting and and booting to the non-default volume.
You can clone your startup volume to another drive volume by using Disk Utility's Restore option, or better yet by using a third-party shareware utility like CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper!, which most folks seem to prefer.
If you have questions, please feel free to post back and one of the Members will gladly help you further.
Gary

BOOT DRIVE ADVICE for MAC PRO. How Big and Partition Size

So new new Mac Pro (Quad) arrives this week.
I'm doing a drive just for BOOT and another drive (or drives) for data.
The big question is, what size drive should I buy for just BOOT/OS/APPLICATIONS and how much of it should I partition. I want to install everything on the boot drive to be on the outside area of the disc and ignore the inside.... So, do I get a 300GB drive and partition 100GB to use as the boot partition and ignore the rest?
Any advise would be helpful!
Thanks!

If you have Final Cut, X-Plane and such, you'll find even 150GB to be small. You want to have plenty of free space for burning DVD-DL, temp space for programs and files, and so that free space never gets too highly fragmented.
A 200GB partition on a 640GB drive seems to be a good choice and it will still maintain 80MB/sec. Still use the rest as an alternate for your data (put it on a sparse disk image).
10K Raptor 300GB (Amazon, $229) is a nice, fast boot drive if you really need it, though most 640GB drives are more than adequate for most people.
If you plan to install Windows, I'd dedicate a drive just for that purpose and not use your boot drive. Not sure if "BOOT" meant just OS/Apps or more.

Adding mSATA to W530 as boot drive

I saw somewhere that you could add an mSATA drive to the W530. But can you then make that your boot drive? I want to add an SSD but am deciding either an MSATA drive or a regular SSD. I'd like to keep my old hard drive as abackup (probably even leave it in the system if I can get an mSATA to boot the OS from itself).
Any ideas or instructions on how to get this to work? I'm thinking I need at least a 500 GB drive (i tend to run a lot of VMs on my laptop).

It's easy peasy. Just be aware that the msata slot is only sata II so it's limited at 3Gb/s. The hardest part is selecting the best msata, but I'll even do that for you...get the Plextor M5M or the Samsung EVO if you need 1000 GB of space.
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Buying a new iMac - can you use an external SSD drive as boot drive?

Here is the question: Can you attach an external SSD and use that as your boot drive accompanying an iMac? This way all the Apple warranties stay valid but I am not saddled with the expense of the Apple installed SSD price?
Now for some background ...
I am looking to buy a new iMac replacing my loved but woefully underpowered Mac Mini. In a perfect world I would like the following set-up based on how today's iMacs can be configured:
Processor: 3.4GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7
Memory: 16GB 1333MHz DDR3 SDRAM - 4x4GB
Hard Drive: 1TB Serial ATA Drive + 256GB Solid State Drive
Graphics: AMD Radeon HD 6970M 2GB GDDR5
Optical Drive: 8x double-layer SuperDrive
The problem is I'd rather not spend $3200+. I would imagine most people plug something similar in and then begin to ID must vs. nice to haves. So, here are my must haves:
Memory: Minimum 16GB 1333MHz DDR3 SDRAM - 4x4GB (I was thinking of starting with minimum and then purchase the right RAM and installing myself)
Graphics: AMD Radeon HD 1GB
Hard Drive: 256GB Solid State Drive
I like to work the graphics side and have a media library of almost 1TB (uploading, downloading, converting, editing, etc.). With my existing setup I have 3+TB of external storage but again, am suffering massively in the horsepower department as it takes hours for me to do what I believe a new iMac can help me accomplish in a fraction of that time. This is not my profession so while I looked at the towers I still need this computer to serve as a family computer as well. Appreciate your thoughts and feedback.
Cheers,
-Jim

Ok this is great as we are progressing through.
So yes it can be done but there's the caveat of the "pipes" once you go external. The only option for an external SSD Drive with thunderbolt that I know of is LaCie's 240 GB version ... Priced at $800.
I think what I will need to do is suck it up. The new MacBooks have the core technology I'd like but we really want the larger screen.
Last question - should I wait/when might we expect an updated line of iMacs? In a few months or not for a while? That answer may provide some direction if it is anticipated to be sooner vs later.
Thank you!

Boot Drive isn't mounted, causing Kernel Panic

Hey everyone,
I'm on the latest version of Panther and I am getting a Kernel Panic (You need to restart your computer) everytime I boot. Now I've tried a lot of things already, from zapping my PRAM to Reseting my PMU. I ran a Hardware test and that's all kosher. I can't get into Safe Mode from holding Shift during boot.
I have however found something interesting; I ran Disk Utlility from my OS X disc and have found that my Boot Drive (Itchy) is greyed out and not mounted but my Storage Drive (Scratchy) is just fine. I can Verify and Repair the disk but I cannot Verify or Repair Disk Permissions which Mac 101 recommends. I tried simply selecting the volume and clicking mount but it isn't working. I played with the cords connecting to my drive and they're all plugged in tight.
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Sounds like your boot drive is bad.

Will I lose Raided Drives if I wipe the boot drive?

Hey,
I'm having a couple different issues with my computer, so I'm hoping if I wipe down and zero out the boot drive and reinstall evrything back to the factory settings, some of the issues will be resolved.
I have two 500gb drives in the Mac Pro that are Raided together. I performed the raid through the disc utilities. I am wondering if I erase everything from the boot drive will it be able to reconize the Raid btw the two drives when it is restored, giving me acesss to everything saved on the raid.
Thanks very much!

RAID-ness is an attibute of the Drive, not the Mac, and not the boot drive.
If you took a RAID drive out and put it in another Mac running a similar Operating System, it would still be a RAID drive.
Rebuild your boot drive with confidence, it should have no impact on your RAID drives.

Boot drive - seeing if it getting filled up in Maverick OSX?

hello
Questions
1) How do I comment on this posted TIP-style dicussion? (link below) the comment tab is shown but no new is available?
2) How do I check my boot drive in Maverick osx is not getting filled up as per the discussion TIP? The screenshot is not the same in maverick osx.
https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-3521
This discussion
Boot drive is getting filled up
Open Activity Monitor in your Applications > Utilities folder and look at your Disk Usage.
Screen shot 2012-05-06 at 11.25.27 PM.jpg
If your boot drive is near full, anything over 80%, then you need to consider using a Storage Drive to offload some of your User Files located in your Documents, Pictures, Movies etc folders. I would start with Movies as they tend to be quite large and moving a lot of them will free up space on your boot drive. You may need to reboot for OS X to recognize the new drive space.

If you have the Macintosh HD on your Desktop, you can right click it and select Get Info.
Or, you can open Disk Utility and select your Macintosh HD to see capacity, used and free in the lower right corner of the screen.
You can also click the Apple logo in the upper left corner of your screen, select About this Mac, click the More Info button then Storage.

My opinion on WD Raptor as boot drive

After doing much research, I decided to buy the WD 150 ADFD and use it as a boot drive in my MacPro 2.66. In the other drive bays, I have two WD RE320's as RAID 0, and a single WD 500 for storage.
The reason I'm posting is not to specifically ask a question, but to give my honest opinion on whether a single Raptor makes for a good boot drive or not. As I did my research on the web, I found the general consensus that the Raptor was the drive to buy if you could afford it. The noise was supposed to be not that noticiable, and the speed vs lack of storage was a reasonable trade-off. It's supposed to be the premium SATA drive! As it turns out, I found that consensus to be wrong, and my trust in others opinions is going to cost me a 15% restocking fee. I bought a Raptor last week and have been trying it out over the holidays. I'm sending it back tomorrow and eating the restocking fee that Newegg charges for returns.
The reason I'm returning the drive is because, first off, the speed is not that significant when you consider the premium you are paying for it. The Raptor shaved about 3 seconds off my boot time. Big deal (sarcasm). Applications open maybe a second or two faster (big deal again), though it's hard to tell on my MacPro because it's so fast to begin with. As for general "snappiness" to the OS and general computing, I found NO discernable difference between the Raptor and the stock Seagate that shipped with the computer. Working with Final Cut Pro, I didn't notice any difference in performance and that is my primary application. The RAID 0 is probably having more positive effect on rendering than the Raptor. Then there is the noise... first let me say that the Raptor is quiet when it's at idle. I have no issue with that. The problem for me is that when the head starts seeking, the sound is jarring. Like microwave popcorn? Tadadadadadada...tick....tick....tick....tadadadadada.
What makes the seek noise so bad is that the computer is normally so quiet by comparison. So, if I'm sitting in my office and it's really quiet, all I hear is the faint sound of my X1900 fan. Then the Raptor kicks in and it's like finger nails going across a chalk board. Okay... maybe that an exaggeration, but it really is distracting! I also really hate when the Raptor just does a random loud click when your surfing the web or not doing anything disk intensive. Like, as I'm writing this post... click.......(silence)................... click, click...............(silence)... you get the idea. None of my other drives do that.
I think the Raptor is probably the way to go if your using them in a Raid configuration AND in an area with fairly loud ambient sound, or if you have a tendency to always have music on. However, if you are fairly sensitive to jarring noise and don't need to worry about shaving a few seconds off boot times, then I suggest to go with something besides the single Raptor as boot. Raptors in RAID is another issue entirely and I'm not knocking that. What I am knocking is when I read where someone posts that the noise in their Raptors in RAID are barely noticable. I call BS on that so beware.
I'm sending my Raptor back soon as I get an RMA and going back to the stock Seagate until I figure out what else to use. Maybe the WD SE 320 Caviar or the Maxline Pro? Something around 320GB for OS and applications only and a Windows partition.
Any suggestions?
Thanks for reading. Your comments are appreciated!
Al

To be honest, I haven't run extensive scientific
tests but the ones I did perform didn't show much of
an advantage using a single Raptor as the
OS/application boot drive. Last night I booted off
the Raptor and then loaded a Final Cut project and
rendered out the timeline. The scratch disk was set
to the RAID and the media was coming off a storage
drive. It took 4 minutes 49 seconds to render the
timeline. Next, I booted off the stock Seagate 160
(7200.09) and ran the same render. The OS was an
exact same version that I'm running on the Raptor (I
had cloned the Seagate from the Raptor using
SuperDuper!). Anyway, I ran the render on the same
file and it took exactly the same amount of time. 4
minutes 49 seconds.
Again, am I missing something here?
You are not missing anything.
Using a "fast disk" as the system drive will improve some things, and if you are used to an older, slower disk drive then you'll probably notice a bigger difference. A Raptor in a macpro for OS use is only going to help marginally, in the way you have noted. Better, but not that much.
I'm not sure about your expectation of seeing FCP perform better in your test though. I wouldn't expect there to be any improvement there. Rendering speed tends to be limited by processing rather than disk speed for a start. Where a fast drive helps is when applications need fast reads and writes. Writing a 100GB self-contained movie from the FCP timeline to some external storage wont be speeded up no matter what system drive you have (unless the original footage is stored on the OS disk of course!). The speed will be dictated by the drive your writing to and the drive you are reading from. Unless you have set your scratch disk as your boot drive or footage is stored there or you're writing to it then the boot drive will have no effect.
Like everything in computer land, whether you need that extra power, speed, size etc always erm... "depends". having just 5% extra kick might be the difference between a realtime preview or a render for eg.
I agree with a "vibe" I am picking up from you though: that all those reviews and user comments on the web can be very misleading. If you've spent $50 more on something then its not easy to admit (even to yourself) that it wasn't ~really~ worth it. Once you see the quoted benchmarks for yourself and the 2sec reduction at boot most folks will feel the purchase was worth it. Will it make you work better? Not really. I went from a G3 B/W mac to a MacPro but the music I make is no more jolly than it was before
If you ~really~ want to see big improvements to any standard drive you have to look at RAID and more specialist solutions like scsi and fibre channel - but even these wont make your processor work any quicker!

Driver wizard says The drivers of your printer are disabled, but doesn't fix.

OfficeJet 6500 E709a series. Windows 7 64-bit. Printer operates from Word, emails, Copy function. Two programs, Photoshop and Printshop, no longer print when directed to print. Printshop says "Install a printer." Print Shop has tasks in printer queue and won't print. Hp Driver Wizard says,
The current full HP software is already installed for the selected printer but the basic functionality drivers appear to be missing or configured incorrectly. Click Next. After the click: The drivers of your printer are disabled, Click next to enable them.
These responses spool with no further option.
This question was solved.
View Solution.

Hi there mandrelliott,
Try downloading and running the print and scan doctor located here:
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=c03275041&cc=us&dlc=en&lc=en
It can fix a lot on its own and if not give a better idea of what is going on.
Best of Luck!
You can say thanks by clicking the Kudos Star in my post. If my post resolves your problem, please mark it as Accepted Solution so others can benefit too.

HT204135 I have a MacBook Air and bought a Canon MP495 printer scanner with WiFI. Since the Mac gas no disk drive and had to down load the printer, scanner drivers and a navigation and network software from Canon's website. How do I get the software to wo

I have down loaded printer,scanner drivers and 2 applications Navigator and Network from Canon's website. I cannot seem to get these to run althought the printer works when connected to the Mac with a LAN cable Canon's documentation is useless because it relies on downloading a disc which you cannot do without a CD drive that MacBook Air does not have. Any suggestions appreciated.

Hi John. Thanks for that input. At Step 6, after clicking "Next" I get a window telling me my OS version is unsupported and the installation may not complete. I am prompted to go to Canon's web site to "Check Latest Info".
I've had this window on previous attempts and from Canon's web site I downloaded two drivers as follows
- ICA Driver V4.0.0
- Canon IJ Network Tool V4.5.0
I'm not sure if these are the correct / complete drivers I need for this install or not.
I continue to follow all the steps. At step 9 I click "Wireless Set Up using USB" amd get a License Agreement (a little different than instructions)
I click "Agree" and it goes to a Setup window with two progress bars showing the installation. I've not been prompted to connect the USB?
After the Setup window is done, I am then prompted to connect the printer via USB. I connect the printer and click on "Redetect". It is not detected.
I then try following the Canon on screen instructions for connecting to the wireless LAN amd enter the password. It searches and indicates "Connecting" on the window, but it never connects and the blue light just blinks
So, at this point I am stuck??
Thanks
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Microtek scanner 6800 with digital ice. Digital ice function crashes scanner. no driver available from Microtek for imac.

My microtek scanner 6800 with digital ice (repair function) worked great with PC. Microtek suggested a driver from internet. Works fine but digiatl ice function crashes scanner when I try it. Microtek says the driver is not a certified driver and that this is a bug which cannopt be fixed by them. Also say that there is no certified driver for IMAC. Ideas anyone??

My microtek scanner 6800 with digital ice (repair function) worked great with PC. Microtek suggested a driver from internet. Works fine but digiatl ice function crashes scanner when I try it. Microtek says the driver is not a certified driver and that this is a bug which cannopt be fixed by them. Also say that there is no certified driver for IMAC. Ideas anyone??

How to install Windows on a SATA boot drive

Here is how to install Windows XP on a SATA boot drive. This procedure was first developed by syar2003 and has been used by many iusers ncluding myself. Although it was originally developed for Neo2 mb's and Windows XP Pro, it has general applicability to systems as well.
1. Have only the SATA drive you want to be the boot drive active in your system. Disconnect the power to all other HDD's if any.
2. Have only one optical drive active. Disconnect the power to the other opticals if any. (Best to have a burner optical as master on IDE1.)
3. Plug SATA drive into SATA 1 on the mb. (it may show us as an IDE drive somewhere down the list in BIOS. That's okl)
4. Enable appropriate SATA options in BIOS. Set boot order to floppy, cd, SATA drive. Set boot priority to SATA drive.
5. Partition and format the SATA HDD using the utilites CD that came with the SATA drive. (If you don't have an HDD utilities disk, download one from the website of your HDD manufacturer.)
6. Run Windows setup. No need to load drivers at the F6 promt unless you are planning to do a RAID configuration.
7. Windows XP should install without incident.
8. After you are up and running, plug the power back into your other HDD and optical drives if any.
If you have a board older than the K8 series, it may be necessary to load the SATA drivers at the F6 prompt. If the above procedure does not work, than try it again loading the SATA drivers.
If this procedure does not work for you, it is likely that your particular SATA HDD has some compatablity problem with Windows setup and/or your motherboard. The solution to this is to try another SATA drive. In general, most failures using this procedure have been traced to certain WD, Seagate and Hitachi SATA drivers of smaller capacities. Fewer problems seem to have occured with Maxtor HDD's.

Kaplan, from an earlier post of mine regarding sata2 hdds - I have them plugged into the sata1&2 ports, installed the nvidia raid first and then installed winxp (in both raid 0 and raid 1). My bios is 3.1 and its a known problem that bios 3.3 & 3.4 have nvidia raid problems but seems to be fixed in the beta bios 3.53:
I just purchased 2 hitachi deskstar sata2 80gb hdds ($60 each at zzf) and the interesting thing about them is that you have to "enable" sata2. I have been testing the performance of sata1, sata2, raid1 and raid0 and the results are below.
The drives themselves are factory default set at sata1. Since I purchased OEM, no software or instructions were included. I had to go to the hitachi website download section to download a dos based program (the features program) to enable sata2. After enabling the hdds to sata2, they were recognized in winxp in the nforce ADMA controller device driver and the screen reads with the primary channel as Serial ATA Generation 2 - 3G...and all 4 boxes below it are checked (the boxes enable bios select xfer mode, enable read caching, enable write caching and enable command queuing are checked). An interesting thing about the sata2 spec is that all sata2 hdds must come standard with NCQ...its not advertised on these 80 gb hdds on the hitachi website (unlike the larger hitachi sata2 hdds) but its a standard sata2 spec and these 80gb hitachi hdds are recoginized in winxp as sata2.
The other interesting feature about the hitachi sata2 hdds is setting them up to operate in an adjustable "performance" to "silence" mode. The hdds are default set at high perfromance but you can manually lower the performance to increase the silence of the hdds which is fully adjustable to your liking. I tested the highest silence/lowest performance setting and you cannot hear the hard drive at all.
Testing - I tested the 2 hitachi sata2 deskstars with the first result in sata1 mode, the second in sata2 mode, the third in raid1 mode and the fourth in raid0 mode.
First, a significant increase in raid0 over sata1, sata2 and raid1 with sequential reads and writes (PC Wizard).
Write: 28mb/s vs 29mb/s vs 27mb/s vs 53mb/s
Read: 45mb/s vs 46mb/s vs 43mb/s vs 83mb/s
Second, significant increase in sata 2, raid 1 & raid 0 over sata1 with buffered reads and writes (PC Wizard).
Write: 104mb/s vs 176mb/s vs 165mb/s vs 266mb/s
Read: 123mb/s vs 200mb/s vs 200mb/s vs 293mb/s
Third, significant increase in sata 2, raid 1 & raid 0 over sata1 with burst reads (HD Tach).
Burst Read: 133mb/s vs 225mb/s vs 219mb/s vs 334 mb/s
It is interesting to note that raid1 is better than sata1 but marginally slower in all tests over sata2. Raid0 is significantly faster on all tests.

Trying to dual boot Windows 7, Mac Pro 3 (2008) doesn't recognize USB boot drive

My system has no optical drive either. I've managed to set up the boot drive in VMWare fusion, and I've confirmed that the boot drive is correctly formatted, because it shows up on my MBP. I've tried blessing this hard drive, I've tried boot camping my way in, but the Mac Pro 2008 model seems adamant about only going via disk. Any super user commands to get my usb thumb drive recognized at option-restart time?

iancray wrote:
UPDATE: Last night, I installed Windows 7 next to Yosemite on my MBP. Copied the Windows partion to my external, and then tried to copy that partition on the external to my MP. No success, probably because MBP and MP have different drivers?
You will need to use Winclone to move images from one Mac to a different Mac if there are any hardware differences. It is a commercial tool.
Please see https://twocanoes.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/202814148-Migrating-a-Boot-Camp- Partition-with-Winclone-4
It requires a Sysprep on the source first to remove any HW-specific parts and make it a proper image to move it to a different HW platform. Once you have this migrated, you will need to reactivate Windows and install the appropriate Windows drivers which will support your MP-specific HW.

MicroTek scanner drivers hose your boot drive!

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