Congratulations on buying Stacker for Macintosh! This file contains additional information that does not appear in the User’s Guide or More Stacker supplement. Please take a few moments to read it.
1. Late Breaking News
Stacker 2.0 for Macintosh now takes full advantage of asynchronous I/O on machines equipped with SCSI Manager 4.3 and a disk driver capable of handling asynchronous calls. This allows Stacker to overlap decompression with read operations yielding even better performance!
2. Before Installing Stacker
We recommend that you back up your data and run Disk First Aid or another disk checking program before installing Stacker for Macintosh. This will ensure that there are no problems with data already present on your hard disk or removable cartridge.
Stacker checks a disk thoroughly before it starts compressing data during installation. If the disk contains any bad blocks, Stacker reports this problem and discontinues the installation process. The data on your disk remains unchanged. The drive must be repaired by a driver level surface test before Stacker can be installed. You may use any third party driver level surface-scan utility, such as SilverLining, Drive 7 or Hard Disk Toolkit. Follow the instructions provided in the driver's user guide.
3. Helpful Tips
3.1 System 7.5 users
Stacker is shipped on a boot floppy containing System 7.1.2 In order to avoid having your desktop rebuilt as you switch between operating system versions you may wish to create a System 7.5 boot floppy as outlined in the More Stacker supplement.
3.2 Power PC Accelerators
Stacker has been tested and is 100% compatible with the Apple Power PC Macintosh Accelerator. However, you will not be able to boot from the Stacker floppy disk to install Stacker because the required System Enabler will not fit on the Stacker floppy disk.
You have three options:
• Boot from a disk not being compressed and run Stacker from the floppy disk.
• Create a System 7.5 Stacker boot floppy disk as explained on page 5 of the More
Stacker supplement.
• Disable the Apple Power PC Macintosh Accelerator card for installation only. You
can enable it again after your boot disk is compressed.
3.3 Dual SCSI bus models (8100 series and Quadra 950)
If you have a SCSI device attached to your external SCSI bus (bus 1) with the same SCSI ID as the internal disk (SCSI ID 0 as shipped from Apple) on SCSI bus 0, you must temporarily reassign the SCSI ID of the external device during installation. Once Stacker has been installed you may change the SCSI ID of your external device back.
3.4 LC, Performa and Quadra 63x users
The Macintosh 630 is known to have issues with some SCSI configurations. Apple posted a file, "630 SCSI Update" to Apple supported electronic services that corrects this problem. We recommend putting this file in your extensions folder and restarting your system before installing Stacker on a 630 system. If you have already started installing Stacker and run into a problem during the installation, you should be able to continue the installation by adding 630 SCSI Update to your System folder and re-running Stacker.
4. System Enablers
New Macintoshes often include hardware features not available in older systems. To make use of these features, Apple included a file called a "System Enabler" to patch the System file and make it completely compatible with the new hardware and ROMs. This method allows Apple to ship new systems without having to constantly update the system software. Without the correct System Enabler it is not possible to start up a Macintosh. A list of the System Enablers needed for System 7.1- 7.1.2 is provided below.
Macintosh System Enabler Used Current Version Note
A - System Enabler 131 replaces System Enabler 111 and System Enabler 121
B - PowerBook Duo Enabler 1.0 replaces System Enabler 201.
C - PowerBook Duo Enabler 2.0 ships with the PowerBook Duo 280 and 280c
and is not included on the Stacker for Macintosh diskette.
D - Power Macintosh 8100/110 requires system 7.5 or later
Unless otherwise stated, a System Enabler is not necessary for the listed systems under System 7.5.
5. Compatibility Issues
5.1 Disk Drivers
Stacker for Macintosh is compatible with third-party SCSI drivers for hard disks and removables such as Syquests, magneto-opticals and flopticals. We recommend that you not use the following third-party drivers with Stacker:
• Iomega’s driver 3.5.2 or earlier for Bernoulli drives
• RapidTrak driver
• CMS driver
If SCSI probe is installed with the “close driver after ejecting” option selected, you can use the GCC drivers
If you are using any of these drivers, we recommend that you replace it with another third party driver. Chapter 4 in the Stacker user guide provides instructions for updating SCSI drivers.
5.2 Drivers with software caching
We recommend that you disable driver software caching on volumes controlled by Stacker. Some third party disk drivers with software caching can cause Stacker to function incorrectly.
5.3 680X0 Accelerators
We recommend that you not install Stacker on a computer that contains a third party 030 or 040 CPU accelerator. Some Macintosh systems with third party 030 and 040 accelerators no longer startup after compressing attached volumes; if this happens you should attempt to reboot from the Stacker floppy disk and uncompress the volumes.
6. Common Error Messages
You may see one of the following error messages while installing or removing Stacker or while running Stacker's Check utility. The message numbers appear in the lower left corner of the error dialog box.
6.1 1016: 1,1
This is a file integrity problem. Run a disk repair utility and check for cross linked files and extent problems.
6.2 1016: 1, -8192, 1016: 35,-8192, and 1016: 56, -8192
These are drive integrity errors. Run a low level surface scan of your entire disk, not just the logical volume.
6.3 1016;24,1 and 1016;27,3
These errors indicate a device was found with a non-standard SCSI media configuration. Please check your SCSI chain for devices with drive arrays, non-standard partitioning, drives formatted without 512k blocks, or two devices with the same SCSI ID. This device needs to be removed while running the Stacker application. Once Stacker is installed it can be reconnected and used with the Stacker drive.
7. Updating Multiple Partitions
Whenever you update a disk driver for a disk compressed by Stacker, you must first disconnect Stacker. If your disk contains multiple partitions, Stacker disconnects them all automatically when you choose Disconnect. When you run the Stacker application again, it offers to reconnect each partition individually. Be sure to respond Yes for each partition. If you do not reconnect all partitions, you may lose access to your data.