Re: Can I make my new HD bootable on my IIe?

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

Roy and/or Janet Miller <millers@inetnebr.com> wrote:

> My hard drive is in slot 5 and my floppy controller is in 6. Just
> yesterday i turned it on, and didn't have a disk in it, and while fiddling
> around it started to boot from slot 5.

This is probably because you have an Apple IIc or IIgs.  (Another
possibilty is that your disk controller in slot 6 is not a 5.25" drive
controller, or may be a third party drive controller such as the
Universal Disk Controller.)

The standard Apple Disk ][/UniDisk 5.25/DuoDisk controller as used in
the Apple ][, ][+ or IIe (and which can be used in the IIgs) does NOT
support the "continue booting in the next slot" feature.  If there is no
bootable disk in the drive, the computer will wait forever with the
drive spinning.

The "continue booting" feature is supported by the built-in 5.25"
firmware of the IIc and IIgs, and by most other (but not all) disk
controller cards, particularly SCSI cards and 3.5" drive controllers.

> You are correct though that the Apple II starts at slot 7
> and counts down looking for a bootable media.

This order can be modified in the IIgs, by telling it to start at a
particular slot.  Higher numbered slots are then ignored.

> Ernest wrote:
> 
> > Oh, I thought that to boot from a hard drive, the SCSI card would need to be
> > in slot #7 -so that the system sees it first, rather than the floppy drive
> > on slot #6. There I go assuming again.

This is correct, for an Apple IIe with a standard 5.25" disk controller
card.

Another possible solution is to leave the SCSI card in slot 5, and keep
a disk in your floppy drive which contains a startup program that boots
the computer from slot 5.  This leaves you the option of being able to
boot from another floppy without having to play around with PR#6
commands.

> > However, even though the hard drive is formatted for ProDos 8 (version 1.9)
> > it doesn't boot, and when I catalog the first HD volume, there aren't any
> > files there.

To get the hard drive to boot, you need to copy at least two files onto
it:

1. The file called PRODOS from your existing ProDOS system disk.

2. A ProDOS application (file type SYS) which has a name ending with
".SYSTEM".  This will be your startup application, and your best choice
would probably be a program selector, unless you only ever run one
application (such as AppleWorks).

Both of these files must be in the root directory.  If you have more
than one file in the root directory which has a name ending with
".SYSTEM", then the first one will be the startup application.

You can use any ProDOS-based file copy utility to copy these files onto
the hard drive.

Since a hard drive holds a lot more than a 5.25" floppy, you will have
to use subdirectories to organise the files on your hard drive - you
can't simply drop everything in the root directory, because it can only
contain 51 files.


There is one potential problem which noone has mentioned yet: if your
IIe is not enhanced, then you will not be able to automatically boot the
machine from a SCSI card, even if it is in slot 7.  The unenhanced IIe
only recognises the 5.25" drive controller (and a few other cards) as a
boot device.  The enhanced IIe recognises several more cards.

If this is the case, you can still boot manually using PR#5 (or PR#7, as
appropriate).  You just won't be able to boot the hard drive using
Ctrl-Apple-Reset.  The pre-boot disk solution I suggested above is one
way to get around this.

-- 
David Empson
dempson@actrix.gen.nz
Snail mail: P O Box 27-103, Wellington, New Zealand