Re: TWO SCSI cards at once?

["Michael J. Mahon" <mjmahon@aol.com>]

Rich wrote:
>  From some comments on the FAQ it seems it is possible, but it makes 
> sense to ask first:
>
> Are there any issues to having TWO SCSI cards in a IIGS at the same 
> time?  I don't plan to have it on-going, but there are some volumes on 
> one hard drive that I want to transfer to another one.  One card is a 
> CMS (1990 ROM) and the other a Ramfast D.  I was hoping the Ramfast 
> could read the CMS formatted drive, but it doesn't... offers to format it.
>
> Somebody on the FAQ says their Ramfast could read their CMS drive fine, 
> but that doesn't seem to be happening.

Two (or more!) drives is not a problem, as long as you have a unique
unit number for each drive (in the 1..7 range if your card is "unit 0").

The compatibility problem will be the partition table written to the
disk's early blocks.  There were no real standards, and Apple's
"standard" (set for the Mac) was pretty weird, including a Mac driver!

Some later cards with versatile firmware (like the Focus) may be
willing to look around and figure out who partitioned the drive and
then use it...if not, then you may be able to attach it to a PC and
use CiderPress to image it and recover its data.

Generally, the partition table just specifies which block is the
start of a partition and how long it is, so some fairly "blunt"
tools can be used to separate the whole disk image into readable
ProDOS partitions.  If there were DOS "partitions" or CP/M or
Pascal partitions, then you may have more fun.  ;-)

-michael

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