Re: Hard Drives for Apple //c+

[ab616@cfn.cs.dal.ca (Tony Cianfaglione)]

: >      The biggest setback with the IIc/IIc+ when it comes to hard drives 
: > is the fact that ProDOS only recognizes 32 meg in each partition and 
: > you're limited to 4 drives on the Smartport, not counting the 5.25 external.

: With ProDOS-8 2.0 and later, more than 4 SmartPort devices are
: supported, provided the IIc SmartPort firmware can handle it (I didn't
: see any mention of a specific limit in a quick look at the Technical
: Reference manual).

I use ProDOS 8- 2.3 on a IIc ROM 03 and a 1 meg card with a UniDisk and a 
100 meg HD partitioned 3 segments. All I can get is 4 devices and then 
something will get left off if I add a 4th partition. If the UniDisk 
goes behind the drive, it vanishes. If the UniDisk is first, the 4th 
segment vanishes. Ergo...4 devices. It's the reason why Sequential 
doesn't sell a larger drive even though they said it would be cheaper per 
meg to do so.  My system= Internal/S6D1, External/S6D2, CT1/S5D1, 
CT2/S5D2, CT3/S2D2, UniDisk/S2D2, RAMDisk/S3D2.  S3D1, S4D1, S4D2 will 
not access no matter how I switch things around. CT=Chinook Technologies.

: Say you had a UniDisk 3.5 and a large hard drive.  The UniDisk would
: appear as S5,D1.  The first hard drive partition would be S5,D2.
: Subsequent partitions will be remapped to unused slot/drive numbers,
: starting with slot 1.  Assuming you have the IIc with RAM disk support
: firmware (ROM version 3, 4 or 5=IIc+), a maximum of 9 SmartPort
: devices would be possible (using slots 1, 2, 4, 5 and S3,D1).  With
: IIc ROM version 0 (the first version supporting the UniDisk 3.5; the
: version after the original IIc ROM), slot 7 could also be used, for a
: total of 11 SmartPort devices.

: There is then the problem of partitioning the drive: I've never seen
: the software used by the Chinook SmartPort drives, so I don't know
: what it provides in the way of partitioning software.  If it is
: similar to Chinook SCSI Utilities (for Apple SCSI cards), it should
: support up to 9 partitions.

They use a system called CSU. (Chinook Super Utilities?)


: David Empson
: dempson@actrix.gen.nz
: Snail mail: P.O. Box 27-103, Wellington, New Zealand



Tony.