[MiniMan]

Has anone else got this box of tricks to work reliably with a CD-RW drive..? If so, please post the model.

I've got a Smart & Friendly SCSI 4/4/16 CD-RW drive and the Orange Micro Converter to hook it up to my Cube's Firewire port. It is _SO_ unreliable..!! It never comes up first time. I found a fix that someone posted for the ADS drives about which order to boot & connect things in and sometimes that works, but last night it could not get it to show up for ages. The most annying thing is that when it does work, I don't seem to have done anything different from all the times it didn't....

I'm trying to hold off on replacing it, partly because it cost me $600 just over 2 years ago and it still works fine and partly because I know one day soon someone will be making an external, firewire superdrive for about half what I paid for this..!!

Anyone know any tricks to making it work..??

[mycatsnameis]

I just returned mine but I don't have any experience working with it using a burner. I bought it to salvage my Zip 100 (working brilliantly) and my old UMAX scanner (never worked at all although I'm convinced that it was the UMAX software and not the converter).

In playing around with it trying to get the scanner to work I also got very frustrated with the apparently intermittent connection but I learned that the order that you plugged things in was critically important. After I got the order worked out, then I always has it mounted and recognized. First of all, never use the power adapter. Power on your SCSI unit (with the SCSI cable only plugged into it and make sure it's properly terminated of course). Then plug the Firewire cable into your already booted up computer. Then attach the converter to the free end of the SCSI cable, the light should come on indicating SCSI activity. Only then do you connect the Firewire cable to the converter. This should reliably mount the SCSI device (check using the sys profiler of course) unless there is some issue that is unique to your burner.

Hope this helps.

catman

[MiniMan]

Thanks catman, I'll try that later.... It's kind of what the ADS fix was in that the order of things is important. I've always been using the power adapter though, so I'll ditch that. I was thinking about hard wiring the adapter to the converer because I thought it was intermittent power that was causing the problem. Looks like I was on the worng track there.

I'll let you know how it goes.

Currently using it with a Yamaha 6416 - very reliable (that is, once I stopped using the power adapter).

[MiniMan]

Tried it last night without the power adapter and it seems much better...
Thanks everyone..!