Re: Finally...

[supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer)]

jmholmes@swbell.net (John) wrote:

>Well, while I was out of town on a business trip to Sarasota, FL, I received 
>the chips to add to my GS Ram Ultra card (the correct ones I believe) and my 
>FocusDrive.  
>
>A couple of interesting things happened after I installed this new hardware.
>
>First of all, I was told when I purchased it, that the GS Ram Ultra card was a

>4MB capacity card.  If this is so, then I should have ended up with 
>approximately 5.25 Megs of Ram on the GS after installing the extra 3 banks of

>chips that were not in the card originally.  However...  After installing the 
>chips into this card, and then rebooting the system, I checked the "About this

>//GS" under the apple menu and was told that I had 7.25 Megs of RAM.  NOT 
>complaining, just curious where the extra 2 megs came from!  The system runs 
>fine, or at least seems to, though I haven't done too much messing around with

>it.  I only have this evening at home to try to gather myself and have to take

>off for Flagstaff, AZ tomorrow afternoon after going to a Doctor's Appt 
>tomorrow morning.  Anyone have any ideas as to where the extra 2 megs suddenly

>appeared from?

AE made a couple of 6MB cards.  If yours is one of these, then
6MB plus 1.125MB would make about 7.25MB (because of
two competing definitions of a MB, this might be so).

>Still going to have to play with the Focus Drive some.  I put the card in slot

>4, which seems to be where I remember being told to put it, and set that slot 
>to Your Card.  I have a SCSI card in Slot 7, and still have a 5.25" drive 
>attached to the daisy chain of drives (though it is very much an option to 
>remove that and put the Focus Drive there).  I only have a Zip drive attached 
>to my SCSI card in slot 7, but found that the FocusDrive will not boot up 
>completely unless there is a Zip Disk in the drive.  I set the startup slot to

>Slot 4, but also discovered that just turning on the GS with it set this way 
>does not allow the Focus Drive enough time to spin up for it to boot so it 
>goes immediately to the Zip Drive to boot from there.  If I turn the machine 
>on with no disk in the Zip drive, it will just sit there until I 
>Ctrl-Apple-Reset and THEN it will boot the Focus Drive instead of the Zip 
>drive.  I'm not really prepared to just get rid of the SCSI card in there, 
>though I can't imagine that even if I DO get rid of it, that the machine will 
>just boot up to the focus drive since it doesn't seem to have time to spin up.

One option is to put the SCSI card in slot 2.  This will leave the
Focus in slot 4, which will give it enough time under 'Scan' to
spin up.  Because the SCSI card is in slot 2, the Focus will
boot first.  Most IIGS specific terminal programs will read the
modem port even with that slot set to 'Your Card' so this is ok.
If you are using IIe terminal programs, however, then it is just
a simple matter of choosing when to use your Zip drive and
when to use your modem and switching between the two via
the control panel.

> The manual is pretty poorly written and sections that should continue on the 
>next page rarely seem to do so but just stop at the bottom of the page.  I got

>real tired, real quick of trying to read that manual, so checking here to see 
>if I can find someone who has any ideas. The drive turned out to be a 340Meg 
>drive, which I am sure will be more than enough.  Actually, especially since 
>it is divided into 11 partitions, am glad it wasn't any bigger.  The 
>partitions fill over half the screen...

You can reduce those 11 partitions to four or so by changing
some of them into HFS partitions.  But this requires backing
up all the data and reformatting the drive.  You have to be
careful to keep the Focus driver too, otherwise the drive will
become as slow as a floppy.  The Focus driver gives it
optimal speed.

You do not use ADU to reformat a Focus, though.  You use
an ADU clone called the FocusFormatter which is provided
on the disk by Alltech.