Tek740: Hard Drive Question

[egoldstone]

Hi All! I was wondering if anyone could advise me as to how I could "see" what was on the SCSI hard drive attached to my Phaser 740. My reasons for asking are fourfold:

1) The drive has started behaving oddly--sounds like it's accessing continuously (even when nothing's queued);

2) I've never understood how to make use of the capacity of the drive--I mean, its a 4GB drive (I think). What's that space for? I originally thought one could store frequently printed forms and documents there, but if this is indeed the case, I have no idea how to do so...

3) I have to think that after many years of virtually continuous use, it couldn't hurt to scan for bad sectors, defragment, even reformat and reload whatever stuff normally resides there;

4) I'm just plain curious about how the drive functions in the printing process.

Any insights and guidance will be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance!

 

[garlicbreath]

Anyone have any answers on this? I was also wondering why a printer would have a hard drive?

 

[jamesc0]

Hi, I have a Phaser 740 with a SCSI hard drive. I will try to answer your questions.

1) The drive is probably faulty. However you could try reformatting it. To do that go to the xerox site and find the 740 downloads. Dowwnload the utility files which are in postscript format. Download and install OPB file downloader. Use the OPB file downloader programme to send the file FRMTDISK.PS (which you have just got from the Xerox site)to the printer. When it has finished formatting then send file INITDISK.PS to the printer. The hard drive should then be working normally. Print a config page from the printer and see what it says about the status of the SCSI drive.
2)The capacity of the drive would only be used if a lot of people were networked to the printer and printing at the same time.
3)See above
4) If you print multiple copies, and use the printer software to select the copies (don't use the application to select multiple copies) then the hard drive stores the page(s) and keeps churning them out to the printer. I am now printing 500 copies of a graphics page and the hard drive has greatly speeded up the process. Also if you print using the very useful collate option then a hard drive is necessary. You can also download and install on the drive extra fonts though I have never used this facility.

Hope this helps.

Regards, James