Disk Drive TuneUp
Frequently Asked Questions

Format it FAT32 on the PC and have Disk Drive Tuneup installed on the mac. If it is a DVD, you will need DVD RAM Tuneup on the mac.

No. There are only a few instances in which caching from one hard drive to another would result in improved performance. Disk caching always involves a write that wouldn't normally occur. This slows the system, but if a write to the cache can eliminate the need for a read from a slow drive then performance in increased.

For best performance, only use RAM caching on hard drives. More information on caching is below.

The current release supports caching to HFS Extended (HFS+) hard drives. Upgrades are available on our software updates page.

Disk Drive TuneUp uses Apple's PC Exchange control panel to mount DOS volumes. At this time, PC Exchange only supports 512 byte media. Disks with a block size of 1024 bytes 3.5" and 2.6 GB (and larger) 5.25" magneto-opticals. PC Exchange is also limited to mounting DOS volumes of 1 GB or less. DOS Mounter does support 1K and 2K disks and FAT16 volumes

DOS Mounter 98 does support 1K and 2K disks and FAT16 volumes. Our demo is good for 21 days.

The CD-ROM isn't bootable. Apple would not license us a system folder to put on the disc. To update the driver on the hard drive, you should startup from a different drive, if you have one. If not, create a RAM disk with the Memory control panel. Drag to the RAM disk the Disk Drive TuneUp application and a minimal system folder from a Disk Tools disk. Choose the RAM disk in the Startup Disk control panel and restart. Now there will be no open files on the hard drive and you will be able to use our install button. A shutdown will erase and eliminate the RAM disk.

HFS, HFS+, and DOS (FAT16) with the pull down menu under the partition bar.

Make sure the Disk Drive TuneUp Init extension is in the Extensions folder and is controlling the drive. Remove any older SCSI driver extensions.

Yes, but you do need to remove the Iomega driver so that the Disk Drive TuneUp Init is the extension that is supplying the driver.

Disk Drive TuneUp 3.0.5 fully supports OS 9.0, 9.0.4 and 9.1, 8.5.1, 8.1, and OS 7.x.

We're using the DOS floppy specification so any drive bigger than 2.048 GB will not be DOS formattable. You can't partition it smaller since the floppy spec doesn't recognize partitions.

To use a hard drive TuneUp formatted DOS on Windows 95 you need to change it to a removable drive. Use the System control panel and go to the Device Manager. Under Disk Drives double-click your drive. Go to Settings and check the "Removable" box.

First, turn on caching in Caching Setup and restart. Now when a file is retrieved from the drive, the file is also written to the cache. The next time that same file is requested it comes from the cache instead of the drive. The cache should be much faster than your removable media drive so access time is decreased. It is a reading cache so when you change a file and save it the original file on the drive gets updated as well as the cached file. This prevents the creation of two different versions of the same file. Caching may ,depending on your system, slow down backup procedures since the files are being written twice.

Clearly it's better to have a bigger cache because it's more likely to have a previous file in it. However it's possible the RAM you're using in the cache would be better used by the system or application. Make sure the system and your running applications have enough RAM before giving any to the cache. After a restart or a shutdown, both the RAM and disk caches are cleared.

After a restart or a shutdown, both the RAM and disk caches are cleared.

It takes between 5 to 10 minutes per 100 megabytes (mostly depends on the speed of the drive - new drives format much quicker than that) a 2 gig drive will take between one and a half to three hours (or so) to format it. Of course you really seldom need to format a disk. Just "Installing" a partition on it is usually enough to make it ready for use. Most disks come pre-low level formatted from the factory and do not need to be re-low level formatted in order to start using it.

Turn off file sharing and virtual memory. Also make sure you are not trying to format the drive you booted off of (Disk Drive TuneUp won't let you). Best of all, restart the machine with the extensions off, Disk Drive TuneUp does not need an extension to be able to format a device and this way you know that nothing will be interfering.

This means that there was already a driver preloaded at startup. Usually this means that there is either another extension that is getting control of the drive or that there is a disk in the drive and it already has its own driver. If it already has a driver written on the drive then you may want to update that driver to Disk Drive TuneUp. If the SCSI ID for that drive shows that the drive is an internal Mac drive then that is ok - your startup drive and internal Mac drives have their own drivers stored on them so that you can boot off of them.

Before the address number on the icon, we've added a letter to identify the bus. S stands for SCSI and A is for ATA.

If you only have hard drives and no removable media drives on your system then you don't need the Disk Drive TuneUp Init. You may remove it to save RAM and speed up the boot process.