drd@sii.UUCP (David Dick) (03/21/84)
b Problems with the Rainbow-100 hard disk upgrade Sometime in the fall of 1983, I purchased a DEC Rainbow-100 as part of the employee purchase program at Digital. I have been very happy with the performance of the Rainbow for the most part. I really haven't had many problems with the keyboard although I do hate the placement of the angle bracket keys. Around the end of November, a new employee offer was announced to allow Rainbow owners to purchase a 5MB winchester upgrade package. That sounded like exactly what I wanted. I tend to do a lot of C development and doing compiles on floppy was pretty time consuming. In order to make sure that the winchester upgrade would speed up this process I wanted to make sure that it was possible to boot CP/M off of the winchester so that SUBMIT files (in particular, $$$.SUB) would be read from the winchester instead of the floppy. I called the pre-sales technical support number that was provided by Digital for employee use to ask about this. The person that I spoke with told me that while it was not possible to boot directly off of the winchester at power-up (there is no code in the boot ROM), a program would be provided to allow me to boot CP/M off of a floppy and then re-boot off of the winchester. It was claimed that I would then be able to remove my floppy from the drive and operate entirely off of the winchester. Well, that sounded good to me. I immediately sent off my order for the 5MB winchester upgrade. I was told that delivery would be within 10 days of receipt of my order. After many heated phone discussions with just about every customer service person at Digital, my winchester was finally delivered three months after I ordered it. I was annoyed by this delay, but was glad to finally get it. I was very enthusiastic about getting my hard disk installed. Everything went well with the installation. The DEC personal computer products seem to be very well designed as far as user installation is concerned. I got everything put back together and ran the hard disk diagnostic. Everything worked just fine!! Now it was time to install the new version of CP/M that came with the upgrade kit. I unpacked the software and started doing the installation. The first part involved making a backup copy of the master floppy and getting a floppy based system up. That part went well. Then I turned to the chapter on how to boot CP/M off of the winchester. There was a note at the beginning of the chapter that said that unless you have a Rainbow-100+, you can only use the winchester for data file storage. There is no way to boot CP/M off of the winchester on a plain Rainbow-100!!! Needless to say, I was not pleased. I was able to select drive E (the winchester). The only problem was that whenever I typed control-c, CP/M went back to the floppy to read some system file or other. Things were even worse when I ran a SUBMIT file. CP/M wrote the $$$.SUB file on the boot drive which was the floppy. This meant that after every line was executed from the submit file, the floppy was accessed in order to delete the line and read the next line. This entire process was very slow considering that the programs that I was running were rather short. There really wasn't much increase in speed due to the winchester. I called the Digital support number to ask what had happened to the program to re-boot CP/M off of the winchester. I was told that there was no such program and that none was planned. Furthermore, there was no technical documentation available on the winchester controller. That meant that I couldn't even write one myself. If I wanted to boot off the winchester, they suggested that I sell my Rainbow-100 and buy a 100+!! I didn't consider that a reasonable suggestion. It seems to me that it should be possible to convince CP/M to read its system files and $$$.SUB from some other drive, but I don't know how to do it. If anyone out there does, I'd be very interested to hear how. I am sending this article in order to warn anyone considering buying the winchester disk upgrade for a Rainbow-100. If you expect to be able to run entirely off of the winchester, forget it! As it turns out, MS-DOS doesn't seem to have this problem as much as CP/M does. It doesn't seem to go back to drive A every time you type control-c. It also doesn't use drive A to buffer batch files like CP/M does with $$$.SUB. My winchester disk hardware really does work well. I have no complaints about that. I am upset with DEC having told me that it would do something that it can't do and not providing any solution other than selling my system and buying a new one. You can be sure that if I do sell my system, I certainly won't buy a Rainbow-100+ to replace it!!!! Sorry for being so long winded. Please send any replies to: ...!decvax!sii!hei44!betz David Betz Hastech Inc. Manchester, NH P.S. As you can see from my return address, I don't work for Digital anymore. I left the company in the second week of January. My leaving had nothing to do with this problem though.
LCAMPBELL@Dec-Marlboro.ARPA (03/29/84)
From: Larry Campbell <LCAMPBELL@Dec-Marlboro.ARPA> There is a very short program called SETHARD which will patch CP/M so it thinks it was booted off the winnie. I know the customer support people know about it because I saw its listing in a little cookbook they published. All it does is patch a location (CP/M heavies will know its name, I don't) which contains the boot drive's number. Call the 800 number, be persistent, tell them it's called SETHARD... it's short enough so they could even read it to you over the phone. And for *real* computing, switch to MS-DOS. CP/M is a toy. --------