LaCie Silverlining caution
Donald H. Gudehus
Here is my saga with my Centris 650 and the Silverlining software from
LaCie. My old Mac IIx which had one internal and two external drives
ran fine with the LaCie drives and the Silverlining drivers (versions
5.6.3, 5.7, and 6.1. The latest drive, a 4400 Meg with the 6.1
driver was formatted as two 2200 Meg partitions. After my Mac IIx
motherboard gave out, I switched to the Centris 650 which had
System 8.1 installed on it. So far so good; everthing worked fine.
When I went to try my tape backup software, Desktape, I got an
error message that I needed to upgrade. While deciding what to do
about that I tried System 7.5.5 with which Desktape 4.0 still worked.
Now strange things began to happen; when copying a file from the
6.1 version drive to another, the system froze up. Copying between
the other drives created no problem. One thought was that the
drivers needed to be the same version on all the drives with the
Centris. I then updated the drivers on each drive to 6.1, but then
when trying to copy any file from any drive to any other drive,
the system froze up.
Still functioning under the impression that
higher is better, I downloaded LaCie's update to version 6.4.2 and
updated the drivers to that version. Now, when booting, the sad
Mac icon appeared, even with a floppy. Fortunately, I still had
one drive available that had an earlier version on it. I opened
the case, disconnected the internal drives, and booted off a
floppy. I ran Silverling 5.7 and updated the drives in the
following way. With the computer booted and Silverling running,
I plugged in the power plug on each drive in turn and installed
the 5.7 driver.
It may sound like this should only have taken a short time to
resolve, but not knowing the source of the problem, I went through
many zappings of the PRAM, 5 reinstallations of System 7.5.5,
reformatting one of my drives, and thoughts of resurecting my
Mac IIx. So, as a word of caution, the latest versions of things
aren't always the best. Also take note of the fact that LaCie
still hasn't answered my two emails to tech support from up to
two weeks ago.
Donald Gudehus