For those not familiar with the SyQuest:
Well it became the standard for this Amiga, too.In 1986, SyQuest announced the SQ555 and its SQ400 associated cartridge, a 44 MB 5¼-inch removable cartridge hard disk drive, using the industry standard 130 mm disk as its medium. Double capacity versions, the SQ5110 and SQ800 were introduced in 1991. This generation of products became the de facto standard in the Apple Macintosh world to store, transfer and backup large amounts of data such as generated by graphic artists, musicians and engineers.
And as many of you know, WB 1.3 is kind of the wild wild west when it comes to hard drives and other SCSI devices. These were the days of pre-HDToolbox, and in terms of the 2000 it really boils down to the software that came with your SCSI cards. In my particular case the GVP Faaastprep software.
I could get disks to engage the drive - meaning I could insert disks, push the door lock and watch the orange read/write light flicker and eventually see the separate green 'ready' light pop on as well. But for the life of me I couldn't get the disks to mount. To the computer they were essentially invisible, and therefore unusable.
Until now.
I'm going to do a deeper-dive post on how I got this all to work in the near future for other hardware nerds out there, particularly for the half dozen with 2000s who might want to do the same some day. But for today I'm basking in the afterglow of finally getting the SyQuest drive working in WB 1.3.
Imagine popping in a disk the size of most original Amiga hard drives. Pretty danged cool.
As a test I moved my entire installed copy of Eye of the Beholder II from my hard drive to a SyQuest disk. I then successfully played the game. Time to move every thing over I can get my hands on.