Rich Hare wrote:
New information, and a new approach.I turned DMA off and continued writing to one of my 1.2 gig drives. Things went well for a while, but then I ran into a brick wall. I could read from the Zip drive, but when it tried to write to the target drive, it would start to write and then the GS would freeze with some kind of a colored screen (sometimes monocolored; sometimes mottled).Tried it a number of times.Tried a back-up ROM 03, without the Sonic Blaster or the ZipGS. Same results.My current thesis is that the RamFast cannot write reliably to a drive larger than 1.0 gig. Tomorrow I'll attach a smaller (260 meg) drive to this same system and see if I can write, reliably, to that.More to follow! (Evil giggle) Rich
OK,I think I have the problem solved, at least for now. As sometimes happens, there may have been TWO gremlins at work.
Sometimes, when copying files, the GS would freeze with a colored screen. Sometimes I would get the "Bad System Call number".
I removed one drive that I was currently having the problem with. I could write to it OK for a bit, but it got to a point that ANY attempt to write to it gave me a colored screen.
It turned out that this drive was a Conner CPF1080S. The other drives are Quantums, either 270's or Fireball 1280's. So far I've been able to do large file tranfers to the Quantums satisfactorily...
Except when I tried a huge file transfer... 100 megs from a Zip disk with over 4,000 files. Came back to find the "Bad System Call Number" message.
Right now the system seems to be working fine, as I shuffle programs and files around and get all of this organized. I'll keep my transfers smaller (no more than 1000 files at a time <grin>). I've got five hard drives and a Zip drive on the SCSI chain and they all seem to be behaving themselves.
Thank you Michael and Steve for your insights and help. Rich