Re: 5.25 drive issue w/ IIgs & sys 6.01

[dempson@actrix.gen.nz (David Empson)]

MeowWoof <janet_reno@hotmail.com> wrote:

> i'm loading sys 6.01 from an external 40MB SCSI which is partitioned
> into 20 meg segments. no reason for the partition yet, i just wanted
> to see if the drive worked. anyway. my problem is that even w/o the
> floppy drives ((2) 3.5 & (1)5.25) i'm still getting (2) 5.25 drives
> (a&b) on the desktop. this is the case no matter the combo of drives.

If you have slot 6 set to "Disk Port" in the Control Panel, and you have
the AppleDisk5.25 driver installed, then System 6.0 or 6.0.1 will always
show two 5.25" drives on the desktop, no matter how many drives you have
connected to the card (unless you patch the device driver).

Earlier systems (4.x and possibly 5.x) attempted to detect the presence
of the drives, and would only display an icon for the drives which were
found.

Apple changed the behaviour with System 6 because some third-party 5.25"
drives (and even a few Apple drives) were not able to be detected
reliably if there was no disk in the drive.  Apple decided to err on the
side of caution and claim all drives were present.

Note that a similar situation applies if you have any Disk ][ or UniDisk
5.25 controller cards installed and the slot set to "Your Card" - each
such card will cause two more 5.25" drive icons to appear on the
desktop.

If you want to get rid of the drive icons, you have three choices:

1. If you don't have any 5.25" drives (or they aren't normally
connected, or you don't want to use them very often), set slot 6 to
"Your Card", except while you want to use the 5.25" drives (you will
have to reboot each time you change this setting).

2. If you never intend to connect a 5.25" drive to the system, remove
the "AppleDisk5.25" driver from */System/Drivers.

3. If you only have one 5.25" drive, and want to get rid of the
meaningless icon for the second drive, it should be possible to use a
utility program to modify the auxiliary type of the AppleDisk5.25 driver
so that the system will only regard it as supporting a single drive
instead of fourteen drives.  I don't have the details handy for this,
but almost certainly posted it many years ago, if anyone has access to
archives.  (The auxiliary type when read as a hexidecimal number will
contain the digit "E", which must be changed to a "1"; I forget which
bits in the auxiliary type contain this information.  It might be
shifted so that it isn't aligned on a 4-bit boundary, which would make
it harder to spot unless you can count in hex.)

> also, i cannot read or write to the 3.5 drives. they just don't show
> up.

I hope you weren't expecting to see drive icons for them - it is only
5.25" drives which show a separate icon for the drive itself.

For a 3.5" drive, you should see the disk appear on the screen when
inserted into the drive.

Possible causes of this problem:

1. You have the drives connected in the wrong order.  You must connect
Apple 3.5 Drives first, then UniDisk 3.5s, then 5.25" drives last.

2. You have slot 5 set to "Your Card" in the Control Panel.  You must
set slot 5 to "SmartPort" to allow the 3.5" drives to be accessed.

3. You don't have the appropriate drivers installed on your system disk.
You need the AppleDisk3.5 driver or the UniDisk3.5 driver, depending on
which type of drive you have.  (You would get an error message during
boot if the drives were detected but the appropriate driver was
missing.)

4. A hardware problem.  I hope not.