RAM Expansion for IIe

["Simon Biber" <simon@basilisk2.cjb.net>]

Our local junk store had three IIes for $2 each, one had a mouse card, one
had a RAM card, so I picked up those two. I've put those two cards into my
good IIe, and I've been playing around with the RAM card.

It has 256k on the card, with a quarter of the sockets filled. Does this
mean I can fill the rest and get 1024k? Are the chips required easy to find?

I put it in Slot 7 and I'm not sure if this is a normal place to put it.
When the computer starts it says UNABLE TO START UP FROM MEMORY CARD. This
made me think, can I boot from the RAM card? So I copied the PRODOS and
BASIC.SYSTEM files to it and rebooted. A cold boot obviously wipes the
contents, but a warm boot still resulted in the same message.

Then I tried formatting the card. After formatting, it worked! Boots Prodos
fine! I suppose formatting from the system utilities enabled the boot code
on the ramdisk? It makes me wonder why they couldn't make it automatically
have the boot code on there.

Does anyone know how I can get it to retain the contents while the
computer's off? Can I hook up a little battery to keep the refresh going
like the BIOS settings / clock battery in a PC?

Simon.