A friend loaned me some 4 GB Hitachi Microdrives to try in the LC 475.

So far, things have not gone particularly well.

The first problem is that I cannot properly inspect or repartition the drives outside the Macintosh because I don’t currently have a suitable USB reader.

Something strange also appears to be going on with the partition layout.

I later got hold of a USB enclosure and confirmed that these particular Microdrives have a roughly 39 MB partition sitting at the beginning of the disk.

That appears to be something left behind by whatever device previously used them rather than a built-in characteristic of Hitachi’s 4 GB Microdrive itself.

After repartitioning and formatting one of the drives with the HP USB Formatter Tool, I should have a much cleaner test platform for the LC 475.

I’ve also found a Seagate Microdrive to throw into the experiment.

So this is definitely not over yet.

Revenge of the Microdrives will follow.

Sources