Re: Partioning SCSI drives larger than 130 Megs?

[spec@vax2.concordia.ca (Mitchell Spector)]

In article supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer) writes...

>obsbedia2@aol.com (Obsbedia2) wrote:
>
>>Now that external hard drive prices are dropping, I've upgraded a couple
>>of Apple //e's to 80 and 160 megabytes.  I'm using the Apple SCSI Utility
>>disk, but it will only allow up to four 32mb partitions (128 mb).  I've
>>read the ads in the old Apple II magazines that were selling 200 and even
>>500 mb hard drives for the Apple II computers (10, 20, 40, 80, 100,), so
>>I figure that there must be a way to partition a SCSI drive into more
>>partition, just like the FOCUS IDE drive can be partitioned into up to 14
>>partitions.
>>If I'm on the right track, then what program am I looking for?  Is there
>>anything in Freeware, Public Domain or Shareware?
>
>Find yourself an Apple IIGS motherboard.  These can be found
>cheap on comp.sys.apple2.marketplace.  Replace the IIe motherboard
>with he IIGS one.

    It is not as simple as that, it requires you find a ROM 00/01
motherboard that has the IIe keyboard and power connector pins on
the board (most only have bare solder pads) and then find a metal
base pan with the GS port cut outs. I suppose you could get pin
connectors to solder in and cut the base pan with a hacksaw, but
why bother?

    A IIgs motherboard installed inside a real IIgs case can be
found for under $25, plus you have the advantage of all internal
slot cards fitting and an ADB keyboard (the IIe keyboard is not
ADB compatible). It is also worth noting there is pretty much
zero use for a 500 MB hardrive in an Apple IIe, you can get by
nicely with a 20 MB drive (an Apple IIgs needs more obviously,
but a 200-300 MB drive is certainly comfortable).

>Now run GS/OS.  Use Advanced Disk Utilities to partition the disk.
>Note that with GS/OS, you can use HFS, a filesystem that breakes
>the 32mb barrier.  That means you can have one 32MB ProDOS
>partition and have the rest as a big HFS partition.
>
>I like HFS a lot and have never had a problem with it.  I just wish
>the IIGS can boot off an HFS partition so that I did not have to
>mess with ProDOS at all.

    HFS has far too many limitations on the IIgs to be considered
a worthy alternative to ProDOS as a filing system (at least with
the current HFS.FST, and it is very unlikely it will be updated).

Pros:

- Large partitions (up to 2+ Gigabytes in size)
- Long descriptive filenames with few naming restrictions

Cons:

- Very slow for reading and writing (especially writes)
- Incompatible with ProDOS 8 (and some GS/OS) applications
- Not accessible from ProDOS 8
- File allocation units increase with partition size
- No IIgs HFS maintaince software (optimize, repair, undelete)
- HFS.FST very buggy and unstable, corruption chances higher
- Cannot boot from HFS partitions
- Requires special (invisible) HFS driver to be read on Mac

There are probably a few more issues I'm forgetting, but the
main one to keep in mind is *no HFS maintaince software* is
available for the IIgs. If something goes wrong, your in big
trouble. I have a Macintosh Plus handy to take care of this
if need be, but not everyone has a Mac. With my 330 MB drive,
I have 8 * 32 MB ProDOS partitions and the remainder as HFS
(72 MB or so, but I hardly touch that partition for the above
reasons).

Mitchell Spector
spec@vax2.concordia.ca