“I recently picked up an old Syquest style drive to use with my Mac, but when I put in cartridges – even known good formatted ones – they don’t mount on the desktop. I have to run a utility that mounts them. How can I get them to mount automatically?”
Removable media (Syquest/Bernoulli/Optical) normally do not automatically show up on the Desktop unless:
• You boot up your computer with an initialized cartridge/optical in the drive
• You have an extension that enables auto mounting in your Extensions folder.
When you first turn on your Macintosh this is the sequence in which items are loaded.
1. RAM check
2. ROM code loads
3. Drivers (including SCSI drivers are loaded)
4. System loads
5. Extensions load
6. Control Panels load
7. Finder (or desktop) loads
SCSI drivers are normally loaded right off of the media before the System Software loads. To put in a cartridge after the system has loaded and have it show up, you need to have convenience extension that polls your removable drive every few seconds to see if a cartridge/optical has been inserted.
If you are having problems mounting cartridges/optical you should see if there are any other extensions in your computer’s Extension or Control Panel folders that are trying to control removable disks.
You can experience problems when multiple programs are trying to mount and control the same removable drive. Try restarting with your extensions turned off (by holding down SHIFT key at bootup) with the cartridge/optical in the drive. Does it mount up on the desktop? If it shows up, then you probably have an extension conflict.