jjd@bbn.COM (James J Dempsey) (11/01/87)
I just bought a Mac II and I want to buy a hard disk for it. I want
to be able to run A/UX when it comes out, but I'm not sure how to
choose an appropriate disk.
Given that:
* Apple recommends at least 80MB for A/UX
* I can't afford Apple's 80MB ($2699)
* I want an internal drive
I figure my only choices are the Jasmine 90MB internal, the CMS 80MB or
the Warp Nine 80MB.
Someone said that only Apple's drive will work with A/UX or that only
Quantum drives will work with A/UX. Does anyone know the exact truth
about this? My dealers know nothing, the drive makers know nothing,
and a phone call to Apple just yielded "A/UX will be out the 1st of the
year".
If I buy a 3rd party drive, like the Jasmine Innerdrive 90MB, will I
be able to use it to run A/UX? Perhaps some technical person at Apple
can comment on this? I would hate to spend $1500 for a drive and find
out it is useless for A/UX.
--Jim Dempsey--
BBN Communications
Cambridge, MA
jjd@bbn.com (INTERNET, preferred address)
..!{decvax, ihnp4, wjh12, harvard}!bbn!jjd (USENET) verber@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu (Mark A. Verber) (11/03/87)
The CDC Wren III will work just fine on a MacII (not a MacPlus because of bugs in the ROM). MacTutor of June 87 has an article by Paul Derby (on page 48ff) which discusses bring up a Wren3 on a MacII. Included in the article are MPW sources for a basic installer/formatter. Most any drive which uses the Quantum 80mb drive should work with the Apple HD Installer and A/UX also. Cheers, ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Computer Science Department Mark A. Verber The Ohio State University verber@ohio-state.arpa +1 (614) 292-7344 cbosgd!osu-cis!verber
phil@apple.UUCP (Phil Ronzone) (11/05/87)
In article <4317@cc5.bbn.COM> jjd@bbn.COM (James J Dempsey) writes: > >I just bought a Mac II and I want to buy a hard disk for it. I want >to be able to run A/UX when it comes out, but I'm not sure how to >choose an appropriate disk. > >Given that: > * Apple recommends at least 80MB for A/UX > * I can't afford Apple's 80MB ($2699) > * I want an internal drive > >I figure my only choices are the Jasmine 90MB internal, the CMS 80MB or >the Warp Nine 80MB. > >Someone said that only Apple's drive will work with A/UX or that only >Quantum drives will work with A/UX. Does anyone know the exact truth >about this? My dealers know nothing, the drive makers know nothing, >and a phone call to Apple just yielded "A/UX will be out the 1st of the >year". > >If I buy a 3rd party drive, like the Jasmine Innerdrive 90MB, will I >be able to use it to run A/UX? Perhaps some technical person at Apple >can comment on this? I would hate to spend $1500 for a drive and find >out it is useless for A/UX. A/UX has a fairly sophisticated SCSI manager and generic SCSI disk driver. However, at the same time, we incorporated bad block handling and disk partitioning that is somewhat Apple specific. The disk driver is designed to sense "Aha - this is not an Apple disk, but we'll try to use it anyway". So far, we have used (and have had fairly good luck with) many drives, BUT, there are many many many rough edges that we have seen with a lot of the third party drives out there. And, A/UX boots via a Mac OS application that resides on the hard disk in a 2MB HFS partition, which requires a Mac OS driver, which many newer third parties don't have .... (although A/UX can be booted via the A/UX booter residing on an 800K floppy). So - when a drive is sensed that is not Apple, we have almost always been able to use it in "basic dumb mode". This is where the disk driver, supporting 32 "slices" autosizes the disk with the swap space on slice 1, up to a mximum of 20480 blocks, the remainder (minus 204 blocks) starting at block 204 (this is the root / partition), and provides slice 31 to read/write the entire disk. This "basic dumb mode" is supported in all the software, so, most of the time, you can use a "normal" SCSI disk. That is what we designed for, BUT SINCE WE HAVE NO CONTROL OVER ANY THIRD PARTIES, WE CAN NOT AND WILL NOT GUARANTEE IT! O.K.? We do use a lot of CDC Wren III's (150MB full height) and like them a lot. They do give us SCSI reset problems from time to time and one of these days we'll take the time to track down the cause. The SCSI manager and driver source code will be published in the A/UX Writing Device Drivers manual.