[comp.sys.mac] Three floppy drives on an SE?

osmigo@ut-ngp.UUCP (Ron Morgan) (11/27/87)

	While waiting for my hard disk to arrive, I've been fooling around
with my dual-floppy SE. It has a regular port on the back for an external
disk drive, in addition to having an SCSI port. Since my trusty old 400K
external drive is practically worthless, marketwise (and I paid $400 for the
thing way back when...), I'm trying to connect it into that external drive
port and use it for a 3rd floppy, giving me two 800K internals and a 400K
external.

	The problem is, it keeps ejecting the disk. At bootup, for example,
the disk's icon appears on the desktop, then becomes shaded as the disk pops
out of the drive. If you double-click an application icon, it'll ask you
to re-insert the disk, at which point it'll whir away and do what it needs
to do, then eject the disk again. And so it goes, all the way into and 
through an application. When the application needs the disk, it asks for it,
you re-insert it, the application reads it, then it re-ejects it. 

	Other than this problem, everything works fine. No bombs; it just
keeps ejecting the disk. Is this some unconquerable fault with the 256K
ROM's?  Using different System/Finders didn't help. Neither did leaving one
of the other two drives empty. 

Ron Morgan

"Who are you?"

"We're computerists."

"AAAAAUUGGHH!!!"

-- 
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      osmigo@ut-ngp.UUCP
ARPA: osmigo@ngp.utexas.edu

mdr@reed.UUCP (Mike Rutenberg) (11/30/87)

I too am interested in the external floppy issue, even if I have to buy
the current versions of the 800k external drive to do it.

It would in many ways be very nice to set up public SEs with three
floppies since it is hard to keep a hard disk on a heavily used public
machine in a good state.

Has anyone tried it with the newer exterenal drives?  Does anyone at
Apple know anything about it?  I suspect it depends on the external
disk drive having its own microprocessor in a fashion similar to the
HD-20 (which you can daisy-chain).

Mike
-- 
	Reed College -- Portland, Oregon -- 503/775-7003 (before 9am)