Re: Boot Problems IIgs

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

In article <41ng4p$174@Mars.mcs.com>, J. L. Walters <bird@MCS.COM> wrote:
> I'm posting this for a friend. I have almose the identical set-up and
> it works fine for me so I'm turning to you find folks for an answer:
> 
> > I want to hook up my 5 1/2" disk interface card to my GS and get it to
> > work along with my 3.5" drive and my SCSI drive.  I have the regular
> > 3.5 drive plugged into the smart port and the old original Apple SCSI
> > (not high-speed) card in slot 7. Everything works just fine this way.
> 
> > When I plug in the 5 1/2" card (from an Apple II) into slot 6, the
> > system INSISTS on booting from slot 6 no matter what the settings are
> > on the control panel. Yes, I've told it to boot from slot 7 and even
> > had it scan.

Neither of those is particularly conclusive.  If the SCSI card wasn't
accessible for some reason, or decided that there wasn't a hard drive,
then the IIgs will try the next slot (6) and will boot from the 5.25"
drive card.

The IIgs 5.25" drive boot firmware has code to resume the boot at the
next slot if there is no disk in the drive, but this code is not
present in the 5.25" drive controller firmware - it will "hang" the
boot process until you insert a disk or press Control-Reset.

Have you tried setting the startup slot to 5?

> > I've set slot 6 to 'your card' and disk card - it doesn't matter.

That sounds more like a fault somewhere - either the disk controller
or the motherboard.

> > I've even moved the disk card to a different slot (ie 2) and 
> > set it to 'your card' and it still INSISTS on booting from the 5 1/2"
> > card.

What if the slot isn't set to "Your Card"?  I assume it is still the
same.

> > And of course I've gone thru all of the possible combinations of
> > control panel settings.

Three possibilities come to mind.

1. The interface card is faulty, and is being selected for all slot
   addresses.  I think this is particularly unlikely, as the IIgs should
   be ignoring the slot bus while reading from internal ROM.

2. The interface card is faulty, and has activated some signal which causes
   the same effect as case 1.  I can't think of anything off-hand.

3. There is fault with the SlotMaker IC or related logic on the IIgs
   motherboard.


Try another 5.25" disk controller and/or another IIgs with this disk
controller.
-- 
David Empson
dempson@actrix.gen.nz
Snail mail: P.O. Box 27-103, Wellington, New Zealand