Re: Vulcan HD replacement

[dalloff@freenet.columbus.oh.us (Dave Althoff)]

This may not be an acceptable solution for you, but...

When I outgrew my 20Mb Vulcan, I yanked its mechanism, and bought an Apple
HS SCSI card.  I then built a special internal cable, and mounted a 250Mb
SCSI drive in the Vulcan case, and connected it to the HS-SCSI with the
internal cable.  I also mounted a DB-25 connector on the backplane for any
other SCSI devices I may happen to pick up (in fact, I have another 20Mb
external HD around here someplace.

The result works great, though I was forced to partition the drive into
four ProDOS partitions (/GEMINI, /TORNADO, /THUNDERBOLT, and /CYCLONE) and
leave the rest in a big HFS partition (:Magnum).  

There is more, actually...I took the 20Mb Vulcan mechanism and bolted it
to the base-pan of my enhanced //e, connected is power leads to the
motherboard power connector (and upgraded the //e's power supply) and now
that //e will go from zero to Apple Writer ][e in about four seconds.

I did find one problem with the SCSI/Vulcan box hack.  SCSI drives take a
few seconds to 'wake up' and the IIgs doesn't wait quite long enough
before giving up and going on to the next slot (or simply giving up
altogether), so on those rare occasions when I re-start my GS, I usually
have to do it twice...once with the power switch, then once with a
'three-finger salute'.

I found a solution to this problem, but I haven't been able to implement
it yet.  I have a TransWarp GS, and it will do a little sound-and-light
show when it first powers up, before it lets the machine start.  That show is
just long enough to give the SCSI drive time to wake up.  Trouble is, my
TWGS will cause my machine to crash within a half-hour or so.  I haven't
had time to deal with it yet, but net.wisdom seems to indicate a bad CPU
cable.

In case you are wondering...that big drive swap is, for the moment, pretty
much the extent of my hardware hacking.

--Dave Althoff, ][.
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