Re: ][+ auto-boot from hard drive?

[david@uow.edu.au (David Wilson)]

shack@io.frii.com (Randy Shackelford) writes:

>In article <swithrow-1111970015330001@dial56.ccrtc.com>,
>Scott A. Withrow <swithrow@ccrtc.com> wrote:

>>One question, though. Can the Apple ][+ automatically boot from the hard
>>drive? When I power the computer on, it instantly starts accessing the
>>floppy drive in slot 6. If I just let the floppy drive spin empty, and go
>>ahead and do a CTRL-RESET, I get a cursor and can type PR#7 and then the
>>computer will boot up from the hard drive just fine.

>No dice. Nothing earlier than an enhanced //e can cold boot from anything
>other than a Disk II without a PR#. That's because they only consider devices
>with the firmware ID bytes of a Disk II as disk devices when doing the cold
>boot slot scan. No way around that. So that means no booting directly from
>3.5 disks or slinky cards or anything else either.

Almost true. Cirtech made a SCSI card with a jumper that selected between
two ROM images. One had the ID bytes for Smartport while the other was for
old Apple //e and Apple ][+ computers and had the 4th ID byte matching that
in a Disk ][ ROM. Thus, if you have a Cirtech SCSI controller, you can boot
from a SCSI hard disk automatically on the ][+.
--
David Wilson  Sch of Informatics, Uni of Wollongong, Australia  david@uow.edu.au