Re: Apple //e HardDrive

[pausch@saafNOSPAM.se (Paul Schlyter)]

In article <390CD7A5.31DD8157@dcnet2000.com>,
Phoenyx  <quazar@dcnet2000.com> wrote:
 
> First, the GS should hold it's settings no matter what it boots from
> as long as the internal battery is ok. If the HD is in slot 7 as is
> normal, the computer will try and boot this first. It works from
> slot 7 down to 1 looking for a boot device. This device must have
> the proper boot code on it's rom. This is a simplistic example. So
> try the card in slot 7 and the GS settings should be set to your
> card and the boot setting can be either slot 7 or scan. There is no
> harm in trying this. As mentioned, if you set the GS this way, it
> should keep these settings.
 
Does this mean you always have to boot on the same device, unless
you swap some cards around?
 
> There were very few DOS compatible hard drives. I remember the
> Corvus system which I think was a network type of drive. The Nibble
> magazine used such a system.
 
I did some work on such a Corvus system once: it was expensive, big
and noisy!  Those 5 MBytes on the Corvus was partitioned into 35
different "areas" of 140K each, where each "area" could hold one
Apple DOS volume.  The volume was selected by supplying the
appropriate volume number - thus doing:
 
   CATALOG,S5,D1,V2
   CATALOG,S5,D1,V13
 
would produce two different directory listings.
 
The Apple DOS was quite limited in the supportable disk space.  The
limit was imposed by the format of the VTOC, which allowed only up to
32 sectors/track and up to 50 tracks on the entire disk -- which meant
an Apple DOS disk volume could be no bigger than 400 KBytes.  This
caused me some problems when I implemented support for 640K floppies
on my Apple II some 17 years ago:  there was no problem in making
CP/M accept a 640K disk volume, but to mkae Apple DOS accept it, I
had to play a trick: each side of the two-sided disk (320 K) would
become one Apple DOS volume with 40 logical tracks of 32 logical
sectors each (physically there were 80 tracks of 16 sectors each),
and the first side of drives 1 and 2 were referred to as ",D1" and
",D2" while the second side were referred to as ",D3" and ",D4".
As soon as the RWTS support had been added and an 80-track floppy
had been properly formatted, Apple DOS handled this fine.  But there
were some utilities, most notably FID, which insisted on the drive
number being either 1 or 2, so I had to modify FID so it accepted
drive number 3 and 4 as well.
 
 
> Prodos is probably the OS of choice.
 
Yes, for bigger disks.  I played around with ProDOS a little, but
never used it that much.  First I didn't see the need for
subdirectories on a 140K or even a 640K floppy.  Second, ProDOS meant
that you lost Integer Basic, which perhaps wasn't such a big deal
except that I had replaced Integer Basic with the S-C Assembler, and
the loss of that assembler in the Language Card I perceived as a
bigger deal.
 
-- 
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