Re: Syquest ...

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

In article <j552197@pro-novapple.clark.net>,
Lee Raesly <lee@pro-novapple.clark.net> wrote:
> Hi All: I have a Syquest SCSII card, hooked to a something 156 MEG HD.

I've never heard of anything called a "SyQuest SCSI Card" for an Apple
II.  SyQuest is a company that makes removable cartridge hard drives,
not SCSI cards.

The cards I've heard of:

Apple SCSI card (original)
Apple High-Speed SCSI card
RamFAST SCSI card (CV Technologies, now Sequential Systems)
Chinook SCSI card
CMS SCSI card

> When formated, it only sees 1 32 MEG drive. I am told I need to low
> level format it with the Syquest formatter from thier Utility disk.
> Unfortunately I know longer have the disk.

You don't need to low-level format it, you need to partition it.  This
requires partitioning software, which should have been supplied with
the card.  Assuming you have the name of the card wrong, we need to
know which of the above cards you have, and then it may be possible to
tell you what software you need.

The Apple SCSI cards are suppolied with a rather primitive program
called HDSCPARTITION, which does the bare minimum required for 8-bit
Apple IIs, but it totally inadequate for a IIgs and a large hard
drive.  There is a different version of HDSCPARTITION for each version
of the card.

GS/OS includes a program called Advanced Disk Utility which provides
much more flexible partitioning support for Apple SCSI cards.

There are several third-party programs for partitioning a drive on an
Apple card.  There is a really old program called SCSI HACKER, which
only worked on the original Apple card.

There was also a program called Chinook SCSI Utilities, which is no
longer available (unfortunately).  It works on both versions of the
Apple SCSI card.  I have this program and it is VERY good.

The RamFAST card has partitioning software included in the ROM on the
card.

I think the Chinook card included partitioning software, which was the
basis of Chinook SCSI Utilities (basically a different version,
specifically for use with the Chinook card).  I've never seen this
card or its software.

The CMS card uses jumpers to set partition sizes.  It is a real mess.

> My goal is to get a series of 32 MEG partitions. GSOS will see them,
> I understand, and further that P8 2.01 will see us to 6 drives per
> slot. Is so? 

GS/OS can support a large number of partitions per drive (probably a
theoretical limit of 64 partitions).

ProDOS-8 2.0.x can logcally remap SmartPort devices to unused slots.
It has an upper limit of 14 devices, including all floppies, RAM disks,
hard drive partitions, etc.  I'm not aware of a specific limit of 6
devices from any one slot.

If you have any slots that contain a single ProDOS block device, the
second drive will not be used to remap a device in another slot.
-- 
David Empson
dempson@actrix.gen.nz
Snail mail: P.O. Box 27-103, Wellington, New Zealand