Re: disk stuff (Re: GS, //e, and mystery cards)

[dpeschel@u.washington.edu (Derek Peschel)]

In article <5nm4ru$ev3@news.Hawaii.Edu>,
Galen Tatsuo Komatsu <gkomatsu@Hawaii.Edu> wrote:

>...any special trick to booting 16 sector disks on a ][ and ][plus?
>(I grew up on the //e with the privileges of whopping 140k disks, 64k
>on board, lower-case text, auto repeat, and these keys: `[]\ =^)

No, there's no special trick.  It works the same way as on a //e -- stick the
disk in, turn the computer on, close the drive door.  The only snag would arise
if you have a ][ with the old disk-controller ROMs that can't read 16-sector
disks.  In that case, booting them is rather difficult. :)

The TRS-80 would happily erase disks if you had them in the drive and turned
on the power.  None of the Apples ever suffered from such a silly problem.

(Well, OK, there is _one_ special trick: use a utility program like Bag of
Tricks to change the sector interleave on Tracks 0, 1, and 2 to make DOS
boot faster. :) )

Don't expect the disk controller to figure out whether the drive is empty and
go on to the next drive (or slot).  In general, it won't do that -- it will
simply try to boot off of Drive 1 until you hit Reset or turn the computer off.
Your snazzy controller may fix this problem but I doubt it.

If you were referring to booting _13_ sector disks, then there are two methods.
1) Use the BOOT13 program on the DOS 3.3 System Master. 2) Use the BASICS disk.

(BTW, I have *never* understood the reason for the existence of that BASICS
disk -- anyone care to explain?)

-- Derek