Re: IIGS startup pause?

[dalloff@gcfn.org (Dave Althoff Jr)]

Benjamin O Zotto (zotto@nospam.fas.harvard.edu) wrote:
: Hi all,
: Thanks to those who offered hard drive suggestions.  Here's my next question:

: My IIGS (ROM3) pauses at the startup screen for a good minute or so when I
: turn it on before attempting to boot off either floppy drive.  If I do Ctrl-
: Reset, I can get a prompt (and thus boot with PR#x directly), but this is
: getting sort of tedious.  Is this typical behavior?  The box also has a RamGS
: card in it and some other random audio card whose function is beyond me.

Apologies if you've answered this before, but a few things you can check...

1.  Do you have a SCSI card in your system?
There is a way to set up the Apple High Speed SCSI card to force a delay
in the startup sequence to give a hard drive time to spin up.  Not long
enough for MY hard drive to spin up, but the delay is there.  I'm not sure
if the delay always kicks in, or if it only kicks in with the card in a
high slot.  I don't remember if SCSI cards can be pseudo-slotted or not
(the Applie Engineering Vulcan card, an IDE controller, can be installed
in any slot and configured to make the system believe it is in Slot 7 even
though it is physically in, say, Slot 2).

2.  Do you have any 3.5" disk drives?  Are you trying to boot from them?
Assuming your machine behaves like mine (I've never even seen a ROM 3
machine; mine is a ROM 1 upgraded from a ROM 0), if the Startup Slot is
set to "scan" and the floppy drives are connected to the floppy drive
port, the sequence is something like this:

a)  Attempt to boot a card in Slot 7.
b)  Attempt to boot a 3.5" drive in virtual Slot 5, Drive 1
c)  Attempt to boot a 3.5" drive in virtual Slot 5, Drive 2
d)  Attempt to boot a 5.25" drive in virtual Slot 6, Drive 1

If you don't have any 3.5" drives, the system will still try to boot from
those drives even though they don't exist before trying the 5.25" drive. 
So if you have something that looks like a hard drive controller in Slot 7
(or mapped to Slot 7), and no 3.5" drives, but your startup slot set to
"Scan", then you could have quite a wait, waiting for three non-existent
drives before the system bothers to try the 5.25" floppy.

If that seems like it might be the problem, try going into the Control
Panel (OpenApple-Control-Escape) and setting "Startup Slot" to "6" instead
of "Scan".

It's a thought, anyway...

--Dave Althoff, ][.
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