New life on Vulcan?

[herbertf@ersys.edmonton.ab.ca (Herbert Fung)]

As some of you may remember, at around Chrismas time my Vulcan drive gave
up it's ghost. Fortunately I managed to back it up the day before it's
final failure. I've debated whether or not to replace the drive with an
IDE drive or an SCSI drive and decided to go with the latter as I already
have a RamFAST. Not to mention that this would free up another slot.
 
I guess it's about time I've updated this newsgroup about how my recent
modifications to my Vulcan. So can a Vulcan change it's logic?
 
So what do I need to begin with. Quite simply the first thing I would
need would be a cable to connect a SCSI drive to the RamFAST internally.
The only place I could think to as was Econ since they used to make their
Pegasus drives. However the guy on the other end said that they nolonger
make any more Apple II stuff and couldn't help me. I was surprised that
they didn't even keep any documentation on their past products. In
anycase he recommended that I call up Alltech.
 
Well after I got my cable from Alltech, I went out and bought a 540 MB
Quantum Maverick drive. After hooking up all the cables together I
powered up my GS to test it. All the RamFAST saw was my SyQuest and not
my new drive. Great, so now what?
 
I unplugged the SyQuest and tried again but still no drive to be found.
After an hour of frustration I decided to try something else. Apparently
the cable Alltech made for me had a minor error. They put a 25 pin
connector on the ribbon cable for the drive and another one to the
RamFAST then to the external SCSI port. So in this configuration the
drive came first, then the SCSI card, and then the external SCSI device.
Solution? I bought another connector and put it between the external port
and the RamFAST connector. Problem solved.
 
New problem. OK, now the RamFAST saw the Quantum Maverick if I didn't
have the SyQuest plugged in. After a couple of hours of fiddling I
decided to try out the 3.01 ROM chip. Once that was installed the RamFAST
was able to see both drives. Great. So everything is working right?
Wrong.
 
New problem has surfaced. After partitioning the new drive I proceeded to
copy everything onto the Maverick from my SyQuest using Universe Master.
The only thing is that UM would crash just as it finishes copying the
volume. After alot of frustrations I've managed to copy everything over.
 
Now the main problem that is still haunting me to this day. For some
reason I cannot understand, my GS will hang upon booting. A three
fingered salute will reward me with just a black screen and nothing else.
I have to turn off my GS and try again but it will still crash. The only
solution I've been able to use is to re-install the system, but this
apparently is a temporary fix. After a few boots the same thing will
happen.
 
New problem. Three weeks after I got my new drive, it starts to spin down
after 10 minutes of operation or less. I initially thought it was the
SCSI interface or cable. So I removed the cable and turned it on just to
let it run. Same problem. Great. Three weeks of use and the drive is
dying. I return the drive and get a DEC DSP305L.
 
After installation of the drive and reinstallation of the software I've
still got the problem of the mysterious crashes. I'm totally in the dark
as to what is causing this problem. My configuration is as follows:
 
ROM 3 GS
 
5MB of RAM
 
Slot 1: Quickie interface card
Slot 2: Audio Animator
Slot 3: Apple II Video Overlay Card
Slot 4: Transwarp GS 7MHz/32k cache
Slot 5: Vacant
Slot 6: RamFAST Rev. D 1MB cache
Slot 7: Vacant
 
GS and Transwarp self diagnosics have come out with no problems. I'm at a
loss at the moment.
 
Any help would be appreciated.

Please respond via e-mail as well as this group. My usenet service misses 
alot of posts here. Thanks

--
Herbert Fung   herbertf@ersys.edmonton.ab.ca   
Edmonton Remote Systems   Serving Edmonton/Northern Alberta since 1982