a218@mindlink.UUCP (Charlie Gibbs) (11/19/89)
While we're on the subject of bridge boards, here's a couple
more questions that have been driving me nuts.
I have a 2500 with an AT bridge board (Janus v2). Since most
of my MS-DOS work is exchanged with machines having 360K drives,
I'd rather have a 360K drive than the 1.2-megabyte drive that came
with the bridge board. I've been trying to replace the 1.2-megabyte
(Chinon) drive with a 360K Teac drive, and I've been having nothing
but grief.
First I tried just swapping drives without making any other
changes or adjustments. I booted the bridge board from the hard
card I've added on the IBM side (more on that later), put a floppy
disk in the drive, and tried displaying a directory. It seemed to
work fine. Then I put another floppy disk in the drive and tried
listing its directory. I got the directory of the first disk again.
It appears that the buffers (I have BUFFERS=30 in CONFIG.SYS) are
not being flushed.
Next I tried entering the set-up utility by pressing control-
alt-escape. I changed the drive type, which was still 1.2 megabytes,
to 360K, and re-booted. This time when I tried accessing the floppy
drive the system hung.
I've tried adding statements to CONFIG.SYS - both
device=driver.sys /d:0 /f:0
and
drivparm = /d:0 /f:0
in all sorts of combinations with set-up menu settings of both
360K and 1.2 meg. Nothing I've tried has been effective, although
sometimes I get a few bytes of garbage on the screen when I try
to access the floppy drive. HELP!
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Now for a couple of other points. Originally, I set up an
autoboot partition on the Amiga's hard drive. It worked very well -
I have to congratulate Commodore for doing as good a job as they
did. There were a couple of problems, though. First of all, it
was extremely slow - not much faster than a floppy disk. It was
completely unsatisfactory for the heavy MS-DOS program development
for which I bought the bridge board in the first place. Second,
if I tried typing ahead while the hard disk was active, I would
lose about half of my keystrokes.
I was willing to attribute the above problems to the overhead
of the interface. Installing a hard card for the exclusive use of
the bridge board gave me the speed I needed. Since then, however,
I've gotten blank stares whenever I mentioned the slowness of the
autoboot partition. Am I the only one who has experienced this
problem? With the hard card it's now a moot point as far as I'm
concerned, but it would be of academic interest to know if I had
just been doing something wrong.
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There's one more minor point. With the hard card installed,
the time is set incorrectly whenever I boot the system, be it upon
initial power-up or any sort of re-boot afterwards. The date is
set correctly, as is the hour, but the minutes and seconds are
always set to zero. For instance, if I boot the machine at 2:30,
the time comes up as 2:00. The battery-backed-up clock is correct,
and entering the set-up menu with control-alt-escape reveals the
proper time to the second. It's when the time is copied into the
software clock that the problem occurs. It's definitely being
caused by the hard card - if I pull the hard card the time comes
up OK. Any suggestions?
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That's about it for now. Many thanks to Commodore for saving
me from having to get one of those blue meanies. Just today I was
at a copy session put on by our local non-denominational computer
club, the West Coast Computer Society. There was a Kaypro and an
S-100 box there running CP/M, a couple of MS-DOS machines, and a
Mac. I was getting quite a charge running all their software:
MS-DOS through the bridge board, Mac stuff through A-Max, and CP/M
through my own emulator.
If anyone has any hints as to these problems, especially the
floppy disk one, please post or e-mail. I'll summarize and post
if desired. Once I get a 360K floppy disk working, I want to move
on to the next step - getting a 720K 3 1/2-inch floppy disk running
on the bridge board. I must be a masochist.
Charlie_Gibbs@mindlink.UUCP
I used to be indecisive, but now I'm not so sure.