Re: SCSI Harddrive and GS/OS

[dempson@atlantis.actrix.gen.nz (David Empson)]

In article <42rpfm$ceu@booch.legent.com>,  <LOE2708@waldo.cup.edu> wrote:
> 	I recently go a used Apple SC20 hard drive and Apple II REV. C
> SCSI card for my IIgs.  I formatted the disk as one 20 meg partion
> using Prodos.  While the drive works fine with Prodos 8 and 16
> applications (I have Paintworks Gold, Copy II Plus and Appleworks
> installed), the system does not function at all with any versions of
> GS/OS.

I've also had problems under recent versions of GS/OS with an Apple
Rev C SCSI card and one drive in particular.  It works fine on the
High-Speed SCSI card, but doesn't finish booting with a Rev C card.

This is with the System 6.0 or 6.0.1 drivers.  It does work if I boot
System 5.0.4.  I think it is a timing problem - the drive takes a long
time to respond after the SCSI bus is initialized, and this seems to
happen when the GS/OS drivers are loaded.  GS/OS is timing out when the
old SCSI card is used, but not with the new one.

It is not surprising that ProDOS-8 and ProDOS-16 both behave the same,
as they both make use of the firmware on the SCSI card.  GS/OS only
uses the card firmware during the early boot stages, until the SCSI
Manager and hard disk driver are loaded.  They then take over and
access the hardware directly for subsequent disk accesses.

> I install both the SCSI manager and SCSICHD device drivers  
> but have had no luck. Under GS/OS 5.0.4 the system boots but when
> searching the hard drive at the beginning a it displayes a message
> that the drive is unformatted. If I choose the format option the drive
> will whirl for a minute or to then stop. A error message then appear
> stating that the SCSI device could not be read.

Sounds like a timing problem.  It _might_ be a SCSI termination
problem: do you have a terminator installed on the back of the drive?


By the way: it makes message reading and quoting much easier if you can
limit your lines to about 70 characters, instead of 100 or thereabouts.
-- 
David Empson
dempson@actrix.gen.nz
Snail mail: P.O. Box 27-103, Wellington, New Zealand