K2600 And Macintosh Computers; Accessing A K2600 Internal Drive From The Mac - Kurzweil K2600 Musician’s Reference

computer memory can easily be corrupted. You may not know that damage has been done
to these bits until unexpected things start to happen for no apparent reason.
13. A good way to verify your SCSI hookup is to save and load some noncritical Þles.

K2600 and Macintosh Computers

There are several points to consider when using a Macintosh with the K2600:
1. The Mac is not well equipped for having another SCSI master on the bus (that is, the
K2600). It assumes that it owns the bus and its drivesÑconsequently it will not allow the
K2600 to address any of its drives. Therefore, you should not attempt to read from or
write to any drive mounted on the MacÕs desktop. Even more fundamental is the problem
that the Mac assumes that the bus is always free, so if it tries to do anything via SCSI when
the K2600 is doing anything via SCSI, youÕll have problems. The only solution is to wait
until your Mac is completely idle before accessing SCSI from the K2600.
2. The Mac and the K2600 cannot share a drive in any way, with or without partitions. If you
are using a removable-media drive (like a Syquest or Zip drive), you canÕt easily use it for
both Mac-formatted disks and K2600-formatted disks. To prevent problems, you will need
to unmount the drive from the Mac desktop before using a K2600-formatted disk in the
drive. The Mac will basically ignore the disk if itÕs not in Mac format, but once you insert a
Mac-formatted volume, the Mac owns it. DonÕt forget: inserting a disk in a removable
drive will cause the Mac to access SCSI, so donÕt try to use the K2K at that moment.
3. The only good reason for connecting the Mac and the K2600 on the same SCSI bus is to
use Alchemy or the equivalent. If youÕre using a patch editor or librarian, you can connect
via MIDI. Connecting via SCSI will allow fast sample transfers through the SMDI
protocol. In this type of conÞguration the easiest solution is to let the K2600 have its own
drive, and the Mac have its own drive.
However, we have discovered that when using a K2600 with a Mac and a removable
media drive in the middle of the chain, the following scenario will work:
Start with a Mac-formatted disk in the drive. When you want to use the K2600, put the
drive to sleep from the K2600. You can then change to a K2600-formatted disk and
perform whatever disk operations you need. When you want to go back to the Mac, put
the drive to sleep again, switch disks, and then wake up the drive by pressing Load. Of
course the K2600 will tell you it canÕt read the disk, but the Mac will be able to.

Accessing a K2600 Internal Drive from the Mac

Access PC is one of the many programs for the Mac that allow it to format, read, and write to
DOS ßoppy disks and removable SCSI cartridges. Reading and writing to an internal hard disk
on the K2600 is Þne, but donÕt try to format it using Access PC on a Mac.
If you use a Mac with Access PC to address your K2600Õs internal hard disk, never save or delete
Þles from the K2600 when the internal disk is mounted by the Mac. This could result in
corrupted Þles or directoriesÑit could even corrupt the entire disk. Access PC has no way of
knowing when the K2600 has modiÞed the disk contents, and it could write over existing data,
or crash while trying to read data that are no longer there. The safest approach is to connect a
drive to either the K2600 or the Mac, but not to both at the same time. Of course, you canÕt
always predict when a Mac will access its drive, and it doesnÕt do SCSI bus arbitration, so using
the Mac while using the SCSI bus from the K2600 (for example, doing a Disk-mode operation) is
also a bad idea, and can cause the Mac to hang.
MIDI, SCSI, and Sample Dumps
SCSI Guidelines
6-3