Re: Vulcan drive info

[Wayne Stewart <waynes@intergate.ca>]

Bart wrote:

> now this is iirc and from a LONG while back, but....
> Were there not TWO Vulcan drives?
> one is commonly called the Black Vulcan the other the Gold.  The Black was
> usually a 20 or 40 meg drive, the Gold being a 100 or 120 or there abouts.
> I THINK that the black one has firmware on the card that talks to firmware ont
> he drive.  and that basically you are in the Thus far and No Further catagory
> when it comes to using another drive.  I will look into this.  The Gold otoh I
> THINK you can reformat a drive to use with its card.  I have one of each type.
> THe black is easy to get to, I also tried another drive on it.  No luck. My
> Gold is in a hard to get at location, and runs the main drive for my main GS.
> I am hesitant to tinker with it...  What I DO remeber though is that to LLF a
> Vulcan you need to start the Vulcan formater program
> ( here is a link
> and I think this
> is the right one: http://ground.ecn.uiowa.edu/apple2/apple8/Utils/vulcan33.sdk)
>  then while it is loading type "AE". That invokes the lowe level format
> routine.  I donno why, just know it do.
> -Bart

That's interesting. I noticed that you specified the Vulcab DOS 3.3 utilities.
Gave me the idea that maybe the DOS 3.3 and ProDOS utilities are different.
It apears that they are. With the ProDOS utilities all I ever got was that it
didn't recognize the hard drive. With the DOS 3.3 I was able to get a bit
further. I was able to format and use a slightly diffferent model of 40mb WD
hard drive. A couple of larger ones didn't successfully format. I'll try and
borrow some hard drives to try out tomorrow.

    Wayne