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Mac OS 8.5 issues on Umax SuperMac

Dan Knight

There are plenty of sites offering installation and troubleshooting advice for Mac OS 8.5 - at least for the Power Mac user. Since neither Apple Computer nor UMAX Corporation provides any support for Mac OS 8.5 on SuperMacs, this page exists to cover problems specifically noted by users of the UMAX SuperMac series of Macintosh compatible computers.

Hard drive crashes and data loss

FWB has not endorsed Hard Disk Toolkit 2.0.6 for Mac OS 8.1, let alone 8.5, preferring that the user buy 2.5.3 or later, which is certified by FWB for Mac OS 8.5. However, 2.0.6 does appear to work with 8.1 - it's working just fine on my J700 with a Quantum Fireball 2.1GB drive. At least one SuperMacs subscriber reports successfully using HDT 2.0.6 on the Fireball with Mac OS 8.5.

Of course, anyone with a C500 or C600 should simply use Drive Setup 1.6 and ignore Hard Disk Toolkit for their IDE drives.

With all the changes in 8.5, it may be wisest to use a driver specifically designed for it, so either HDT 2.5.3 or Drive Setup 1.6 are worth considering, especially since recent versions of Drive Setup seem to be compatible with just about any SCSI drive made.

Since Drive Setup won't run a driver update on top of a non-Apple driver, however, the only way to get the 1.6 driver on a drive would be to reformat the disk with Drive Setup, then install Mac OS 8.5 on that disk and allow it to update the Apple hard disk drivers during the installation process.

One subscriber notes,

"That's the avenue I'm personally going to take. A low-level format on a second hard drive, followed by a full installation of 8.5, leaving the drive on which 8.1 resides completely untouched. Anyone who simply runs the 8.5 installer on their drive and doesn't update the driver with one known to be good with 8.5 - be it from Apple or some update from FWB - is, in my opinion, taking a serious risk."

MacInTouch has a page with one user's theory that the problem stems from non-Mac OS partitions.

Twin Turbo problems

The J700 and S900 models use an IX Micro Twin Turbo video card. Twin Turbo software through version 4.0.5 is not fully compatible with Mac OS 8.5. One SuperMacs subscriber reports losing resolution settings and needing to reinstall the software frequently.

You can download the latest version of the driver (4.0.6 as I write this) from IX Micro at <http://www.ixmicro.com/1index_wnew.htm>. Since I don't yet have Mac OS 8.5, I can't determine whether it resolves the problems that have been noted.

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