joseph@elbereth.rutgers.edu (Seymour Joseph) (09/11/89)
I have read a bundle of files about building your own SCSI drive for the Apple II, and felt pretty confident about it. As often happens, reality has brought me back to earth and I am writing this note to get some help. My Friend owns a 1.25 MB Apple IIGS with the newer version 01 (2) ROMs. He bought a SCSI drive at a flea market and then bought the Apple II SCSI interface board (ROM rev C, we checked) for it. The drive he bought was a Nova 30, 33MB drive intended for the Macintosh. We have opened it and it contains an Okidata ST-506 drive and an Adaptec ST506 to SCSI adapter. We set the SCSI address of the drive to 3 and since he has a Mac, he first connected the drive to it, formatted it and tried it out. It worked flawlessly. We then printed out several "How to make your own SCSI drive" articles and set to work attaching it to the Apple IIGS. We put the SCSI board in slot seven, told the Apple IIGS that slot seven contained "Your Card" and then attached the cable to the Nova 30 Drive. We powered up the drive, waited for it to finish it's self test and then turned on the Apple IIGS. Since it had already been low level formatted, (The Mac format software from Nova, knows there is an Adaptec controller and allows you to type in the fault locations before the format.) We went right on to the second step, and ran the partitioning utility included with the Apple SCSI card. The partitioning utility saw the drive as a 33MB drive of type "unknown" and allowed us to make two partitions with maximum sizes of 10MB each. (It was written for Apple's drives and the partitioning software assumes 20 or 40 MB drives). After writing the partitions, we shut down and rebooted with system 4.0 (with the SCSI drivers installed). System 4.0 booted ok, and the finder looked at the hard disk and said: uninitialized or unknown disk, should I initialize or eject it. We followed the instructions we had and told the finder to eject it. We then ran the Advanced Disk Utility program from the System Tools disk of System 4.0. It saw the drive and allowed us to set up two partitions that used the whole disk. We set up two equal partitions, and told ADU to write them. It did. ADU returned to its INITIALIZE/ERASE dialog box with the drive showing as a "?". We clicked on Initialize, the program asked for a name and we gave it /hard1. It took only a few seconds and then the dialog box recognized the disk as a prodos partition, we clicked on the volume button to get the second partition formatted, but ADU would just go back to the floppy and then to the already named and formatted partition. We quit back to the finder, which looked at the hard disk again, and happily displayed an icon for /hard1. Files could be copied to it and read from it, and it did have the correct size, (~17MB) but where was the other partition? We copied GS/OS onto the drive and tried booting from it without success. The system would just pretend the drive wasn't there. When we booted from a floppy, the finder saw the formatted partition and put it right on the desktop as it should. I ran copy II Plus, It sees the SCSI card as slot 7 drive 1 and Slot 7 Drive 2. When I cataloged Slot 7 drive 1, copy II plus told me it was a disk with 8 blocks in it! When I cataloged Slot 7 drive 2, I realized that this was the partition we formatted in ADU and copied files to. It seems the computer won't boot from the drive because only the second partition is formatted. I told Copy II Plus to format slot 7 drive 1, it did so. When I cataloged it, it showed me I had an 8 block partition with seven blocks used. I tried copying a file to this partition using Copy II Plus. It read the file from the floppy, and when it went to write it to the hard disk, Copy II Plus returned the error "No disk in drive." When we rebooted the system after doing this, instead of simply ignoring the drive, The Apple IIGS looked at it and claimed: ** Can't find ProDOS ** (or something similar). It was acting exactly as it should when is finds a ProDOS formatted disk without a PRODOS file on it. Since the system, for some reason, thought it was a volume with only one block free, it was impossible to put ProDOS on it. We ran ADU again from System 4.0 and checked the partitions, it looked fine from there (2 ~17MB partitions) and ADU still refused to format (or recognize) the first partition once we quit the partition dialog box. When we clicked on the GET INFORMATION button in ADU, it put up a dialog box and then hung. We were understandably frustrated and here are the things we tried and the results: We tried getting a copy of System Disk 5.0, installing the SCSI drivers and booting it. The finder under 5.0 did not see the hard disk at all. ADU (from the version 5.0 Tools disk) also could not see the disk at all. We tried starting from scratch and formatting the disk on the Apple IIGS with SCSI HACKER. It formatted alright, taking about two minutes. Then we partitioned it with the software that came with the SCSI card. When we booted GS/OS, neither the finder nor ADU (Systems 4 or 5) could see the drive at all. We tried to format the disk with a program called HDFORMAT. It asks for the slot of the SCSI card, the SCSI ID number and other info, unlike SCSI HACKER which somehow found the drive by itself. When I gave it all the info it wanted, HDFORMAT, immediately returned with a "SCSI error." and did not format the disk. We tried this multiple times. When we hooked the drive to the Mac, low level formatted it, put it on the GS, partitioned it, booted GS/OS, fixed the partitions, and formatted it again, we were right back where we started with only one partition findable by the OS. I did try making one huge partition. This allows us to use most of the 33MB. It worked and we could copy files to it. but it still won't boot because it is the SECOND partition, and it still won't show up on the desktop under System 5.0. Ok, now its your turn. HELP! Seymour Joseph joseph@elbereth.rutgers.edu