Your average Mac is a happy soul, as is evidenced by its smiling face on start up. However, there are (rare) times when it's not so happy .......

All was going well with my IIci until the time when on start up I got the start up chime and happy Mac - shortly followed by a sad Mac & error code along with the 'Chord Of Doom'. (B movie dramatic revelation effects here!).

At first I thought it was temporary so I left it alone and tried later - but alas to no avail.

We Mac users aren't used to having things go wrong so there was a bit of panic at first, (as Mr. Haines knows!), but in the end a process of elimination was started.

I started by removing the add on boards in case it was a fault in one of them and when I removed the SIMMs the gap between the start up chime and doom notes was shortened considerably.

Chuck Jones light bulb!

The start up chime comes after the 'on board' systems check the boards so that must be alright. Then it loads system files into memory - therefore disconnect the HD and see what happens.

SUCCESS! It was asking for a system disk!

(Further research later turned up the fact that the sad Mac error codes starting with 'F', such as I had, usually mean SCSI / drive problems [Ed: = you are F**** ?]). Shoving in a minimum system floppy got things running again and I could think in less drastic terms.

In the short term, there was a smaller HD to get me back online on hand in my oddments box and the 12yr old departed HD was removed. In the Mac magazines there were assorted HDs for sale but they were all out of my price range. However, to hand was the last issue of Amiga Format with an advert from Analogic of Kingston, ( http://www.analogic.co.uk ), and they had HDs within my budget. As it was the small hours it was a bit too late to call them!

In the mean time I did some research and I found out that the HD formatter that comes on the Mac system installer set is nobbled so that'll only recognise a list of certain HDs, (Apple supplied? - cynics may ask), which for we 68K owners isn't exactly helpful nowadays .

With information gathered suitable HD formatters were tracked down and placed onto my minimum system floppies in preparation.

Measuring the height of the drive bay revealed that it was designed for a 1.5'' tall drive and the PSU was very hefty so I wasn't too worried about what I could get fitting in mechanically.

• open the lid
• slip out the plugs carefully
• pull out the tray with the old HD on
• turn it over
• remove the holding screws
• reverse the process for fitting new HD

The HD formatter that was easiest to use was one called "Lido" - which I'll be putting into a 68K download folder on my apple software site as soon as I am able.

When the IIci was new 100MB was deemed quite large. The replacement was around 100 times that size so I decided to partition it into 4 drives before putting it into service.

The reason for partitions on a single large HD is due to the way that the drive is formatted. The HD formatter slices the drive up into a finite (e.g. 65535 ) sectors, so a single 1gig drive will have sectors 100 times the size of a 100MB drive. The creation of 4 virtual drives, (give them any names you like - sys, work, art , play), will enable them to have less wasted space so when Simpletext creates a 4K file it'll just take up 32K instead of 128K. (Ed: Much the same reason as why FAT32 or NTFS is more efficient than FAT16 on a PC).