Re: Apple IIe boot question

[mjmahon@aol.com (Michael J. Mahon)]

Bill Garber wrote:

>> I can't speak specifically to the issue of whether or not the Apple II can
>> boot directly from any specific type of controller/drive combination, but
>if
>> it is of any use, I can tell you this much.  From the II+ onward, the II
>> series machines have had the ability to boot directly thanks to the
>> autostart rom.  The rom code looks at the slots one at a time until it
>finds
>> an expansion card that it recognizes as representing a bootable device,
>and
>> then it boots from it.  It starts at slot 7 and works its way downward.
>In
>> my IIe, I have a Sider drive attached to a controller in slot 7, and my
>5.25
>> floppy drives are attached to a controller in slot 6, so the machine boots
>> from the Sider in slot 7.  If I swapped the controller cards then it would
>> boot from floppy instead.  Assuming that the controller card for the hard
>> drive you want to boot from is one that the autostart rom would recognize
>as
>> representing a boot device, all you should have to do is to place it into
>> the highest numbered slot.  Exactly what the autostart rom looks for to
>> recognize the card is something I don't recall though.  Hope this helps.
>
>My IIe (enhanced) will boot from whatever is in the highest slot also,
>but, it won't bypass an empty Disk II or Apple 5.25 drive.

This is a function (or failure) of the Disk ][ Controller card.  When it
was designed, no provision was made for "timing out" on a not-ready
disk drive.  Therefore, it stops the boot scan.

> Also, it won't
>recognize all 4 partitions on a CFFA card in any slot but 5.

This is a function of which version of ProDOS you are using.

If you use the latest version (2.0.3) it will happily map extra
partitions from any slot to any other slot's drive numbers.

> So, I have to
>put the 3.5 in 6, the CFFA in 5 and the 5.25 in slot 4. The unenhanced
>IIe board I just got purposely to test firmware in an IDE device that
>wasn't made for anything but a IIe enhanced or IIgs. It seems to be
>working ok, except for not booting and only sees the first 2 of the 4
>partitions.

Try ProDOS 2.0.3--you'll like it.  ;-)

> I was very excited to discover that the ProDOS Users Disk
>has a conversion feature that allows DOS 3.3 programs to be made to
>run on ProDOS disks.

This is not really a conversion--it just moves files "as is" from one file
system to the other.  If the file is a program, it may work under the
other file system as long as it doesn't do any disk I/O (which would
require some actual porting--usually quite difficult).

-michael

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