Re: HELP! Windoze ZIP disks on a IIgs?

[dalloff@gcfn.org (Dave Althoff)]

Supertimer (supertimer@aol.com) wrote:
: dalloff@gcfn.org (Dave Althoff) wrote:

: >Update...
: >
: >On the advice of Supertimer and Rubywand, I installed MUG! and so far it
: >works beautifully.

: That's great!

: >More beautifully than I was led to expect, as a matter of fact.  Okay,
: >gurus, figure this one out--
: >
: >I've got a SCSI ZIP drive.  I've got an Apple High Speed SCSI card.  I've
: >got a Floptical SCSI driver installed which seems to have reduced
: >some annoyances in file-picker windows.  I have the ProDOS, HFS, MS-DOS,
: >and DOS 3.3 FSTs installed.

: Where do you get the Floptical driver?  I leave my Zip drive
: turned off because I don't like the "infinity polling" caused
: by a Zip drive turned on without a Zip disk in the drive.  ;-)

: Does the Floptical driver solve the spin down/timeout
: problems too?

I really don't know the extent of the fixes.  All I know is that I hooked
up the Zip drive and the machine went all unstable; I installed the
Floptical driver and things got more or less back to normal.  I do get
infinity polling, and I do get spin-downs, but none of those problems has
proved insoluable.  Usually, if the partition is still mounted, I can get
it to come up...I don't know if the drive is coming back up, or if I just
get lucky.  If the partition is not mounted (say, for instance, I left the
Finder then came back) but the disk is still in the drive, I must eject and
reinsert the disk in order to get it to mount.

The driver I'm using was on Richard Bennett's web page, and in all honesty
I am still not sure that I'm actually using it.  I've considered disabling
the standard SCSI driver (since Richard claims this driver is just a
modified version...something about giving the removeable device a few
extra seconds to mount or something like that, so it ought to work with
my HD) to make sure that I'm using it

: >And now I have MUG!.
: >
: >I was informed that in order to use MUG! I would need to launch a GS/OS
: >application before running MUG! so that the Finder's "I don't regognize
: >this disk! <Format> <<Eject>>" window wouldn't come up and annoy me.
: >
: >For some reason, this doesn't happen to me.
: >
: >With only the System 6.0.1 Finder operating, if I stick my MS-DOS Zip disk
: >into the drive, I get the sound effect associated with mounting a disk,
: >then *nothing happens*.  No error message.  No new icon on the desktop. 
: >Nothing at all.  This allows me to run MUG! from the finder, with access
: >to all of the file management features.
: >
: >The upshot of all this?  
: >
: >My problem is solved.  Now the question is, why does it seem to work
: >better for me than others, including the program author, have reported?

: Could it be the floptical driver?

: Your symptoms are similar to those of a RamFAST user who
: I and MUG!'s author (Peter Watson) were trying to help get
: MUG! to read PC Zip disks with.  He described the same
: symptoms.  Nothing happened when he inserted an MS-DOS
: Zip disk under Finder.  However, he was not able to get MUG!
: to read the Zip disk at all while your system reads them with
: no problems.

: All of the other Apple High Speed SCSI and RamFAST users
: I've communicated with say MUG! works with PC Zip disks
: fine, but that Finder produces the "Eject or Format" dialog
: box.

: I would be very interested in getting rid of the Finder alert
: and still keeping MUG!'s MS-DOS ability enabled.  So
: please tell us how you did it.  Could it be the Floptical
: driver?  I'm sure MUG!'s author would be interested too.

It's possible, but I doubt it.  My pet theory is that this is because I
have the MS-DOS FST installed.  For whatever reason, the FST is looking at
the disk and saying, "I recognize that as a FAT disk!" but then it is
seeing the partition table and saying, "...But I don't see a volume here"
and therefore the disk isn't mounting.  Because the FST recognized it as a
valid disk, the Finder error is suppressed.

There is another issue which may be at work here.  The particular ZIP disk
was preformatted, I found out later, for HFS, and then reformatted by
Windows '95 OSR-2.  Could it be that there are some remnants of the HFS
formatting on that disk, so my HFS FST is seeing the disk, but not
mounting it because the disk has no HFS partitions on it?

Perhaps what I need to do for further study is to try a preformatted
MS-DOS ZIP disk and see if that generates the error...I had no idea that
my situation was unusual... 8-)

--Dave Althoff, ][.
-- 
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