faubel@apollo.uucp (Ken Faubel) (11/15/85)
Has anybody had any experience with Rana disk drives under PASCAL (or PRODOS). I have
two Elite II drives that I bought about two years ago. I have been very pleased using
them with my Apple //e under PASCAL 1.1 and I now would like to move to PASCAL 1.2
(and 1.3 as soon as I can).
My problem is that Rana has never put out an OS patch for PASCAL 1.2 and since they went
belly up I expect that I am on my own. I was told about a year ago that I would need to
buy their newest PROM (1.4 I think) if I was going to use PRODOS and that any PASCAL fix
that they might come out with would be based on this level of firmware. After spending
$50.00 on the PRODOS upgrade, I now have the new PROM and a PRODOS disk. The new PROM is
supposed to follow Apple conventions for disk controllers under PRODOS and at a minimum let
these drives work as regular 143K drives. The drives will not boot PRODOS and the disk they
sent me was broken. I also had to undo the //e enhancement because it conflicts with Rana's
PASCAL 1.1 patch. The one good thing is that I can use the disks as regular 143K drives
under PASCAL 1.2 (640 blocks is alot to keep track of anyway :-).
My questions are:
1) Does anyone have a working Rana disk for PRODOS?
2) Are there any PASCAL 1.2 (or 1.3) patches available to access the full 320K of the
Elite II drives?
3) Does anyone have any experience with Apple PASCAL device drivers for the Rana drives?
4) Are there any suggestions short of spending hundreds on a hard disk or Unidisk 3.5?
Please send email and I will forward a summary if anyone else is interested.
Thank you in advance.
Ken Faubel decvax!wanginst!apollo!faubel