G.GUTOW@MACBETH.STANFORD.EDU (Jonathan Gutow) (07/27/88)
I have a Mac Plus equivalent computer: ie 512k mother board, with the Apple ROM upgrade and Dove upgrade to 1Mbyte. I have an old serial hard drive test marketed by Apple a few years ago. I've managed to get it running with the new ROMs, but can not use it as a system disk. I'd be interested in any information that might allow me to rewrite the drivers so that I could use it as the startup disk. Now I'm losing a lot of my memory to a RAM disk. The kinds of things I think I need are: a list of what information has to be passed back and forth to the disk, what format the information must be in and what the communication speed is. Suggestions on how to find these out would also be useful. The drive is an Apple Widget 10Mbyte drive packaged in a profile case with a serial card that says Abus on it. The names of the drivers associated with the disk are: .abus, .brenemult and .widgmult. To read and write to the disk .widgmult is called. It just doesn't work unless the other two are available. I realize that in some senses it might be more reasonable to by an SCSI port and a new drive, but I'm a poor lowly graduate student and do not have the money. Besides the drive does work and is plenty fast and big enough for what I use it for. I also like to spend some of my spare time hacking and think it would be interesting to try to write a driver. Even if I don't succeed I should manage to learn something. Thanks ahead of time for the information. Jon gutow@bacall.stanford.edu (preferred over the origin of this message.) -------
Mark_Peter_Cookson@cup.portal.com (07/28/88)
You couldn't make the disk the startup disk simply because it is a serial drive and the Mac doesn't look to the serial ports for a bootable drive. The reason the HD 20 boots is beacuse it is in the floppy port and the Mac will boot from something in the floppy port (same thing for the SCSI port). But for a serial drive to auto boot, you would have to rewrite the ROMs so that they would look for a bootable drive connected to them (not done by Apple because printers and modems usually can't boot). I have a serial Paradise and a SCSI Photon 20 (ok, so I'm cheap too, but there is a Rodime 140 in the mail). I used to have to boot from a floppy that would run the mounting program for the Paradise and then Paradise would take over the boot half way through (this was part of the mounting program). But I see no reason why your HD can't be booted from a floppy and then you either launch an application or the finder on your HD to get it to be the system disk. This is the closest you will ever come to auto booting. Mark Cookson