ravi@mcnc.UUCP (Ravi Subrahmanyan) (12/16/86)
[] I asked a question some time back re. a problem the Sac has with one disk drive. I've since found out this from David Small. The problem is due to a bug in the current version of the software (revision 3), which essentially causes the following: the motivator cannot detect a new disk once it reads in the disk initially. In other words, even if you eject the disk from the desktop and the motivator writes it out, etc., it still thinks the disk is the same as the original one. He promised a fix in rev 4 of the driver software. I asked him to make it in into a real ramdisk, instead of simply a disk cache for drive A:. Some others had similar suggestions, so he will do one of the following in revision 4 (or perhaps more than one, with some sort of selection): 1) Fix the bug so the motivator detects the presence of a new disk and reads it in 2) Once the motivator reads in the disk, he will remap drive A: so that it can presumably be used as a second drive: this would be ideal for single disk users like me, since one has to keep the system disk in most of the time anyway. 3) He did say that he will not spend too much time on making it a ramdisk because there are many excellent ramdisks already available for the mac, in PD, which can be used. He recommended RAMSTART, however, I've found that using it causes many problems, and it's best to avoid it and live with the disks, slow though they may be. Please note that all of the above is of major importance only for drips (all right, so I'm a bit leaky at the seams.. :-) with only one disk drive. With luck, he'll build in hard disk support soon and settle this issue. On a related note (relevant to all drips with the Sac, now), does the built in clock keep good time? Mine is ridiculous, it gains about 15 mins a week. My cart. only has a fixed 4.7pF cap. instead of the usual variable one used with crystals, so I don't see any way out. If anyone has any ideas (short of replacing the cap with a variable and tuning the xtal with that), please get in touch or post an article. Thanks, -ravi