liam@cs.qmw.ac.uk (William Roberts) (03/12/90)
In article <235@inpnms.UUCP> logan@inpnms.UUCP (Jim Logan) writes: >Maybe I can get the ball rolling in this newsgroup with a simple >question. Can anyone tell me how painful it is to use disk drives >and QIC tape drives from other vendors under A/UX? >I don't know if the A/UX SCSI driver will support any old big >SCSI disk I plug in. Does the format program know how to format >a disk this large? ... Can I boot from this >external 300MB drive? Can I leave the Finder on my 40MB internal >drive so I can use it sometimes? Disk drives are OK, but they will need to be partitioned in a way that conforms to the Apple partitioning approach, and then some extra A/UX stuff done with the A/UX dp utility. Your best bet is to stick with a disk that is advertised as being suitable for use with the Macintosh (but then these are pretty cheap anyway, compared with Sun peripherals and the like). Any Mac-compatible disk that doesn't require special things in the System Folder should work, and so do some of the ones that do. The SCSI handling under A/UX is more or less generic SCSI commands and the A/UX system understands big disks just like other UNIX systems do. You *must* keep the Finder somewhere since you can only boot A/UX by running a Mac application called "sash" = StandAlone Shell. You can have A/UX and the little MacOS partition you'll require on any of the disks, and you can mix and match to your heart's content. A/UX understands the notion of dividing disks into serveral distinct partitions (as does MacOS these days). >Does the SCSI tape driver know how to talk to >anything besides the Apple 40MB tape drive? Tape drives I know nothing about... -- William Roberts ARPA: liam@cs.qmw.ac.uk Queen Mary & Westfield College UUCP: liam@qmw-cs.UUCP Mile End Road AppleLink: UK0087 LONDON, E1 4NS, UK Tel: 01-975 5250 (Fax: 01-980 6533)
dixon@sagittarius.crd.ge.com (walt dixon) (03/13/90)
In response to a question about what devices the A/UX SCSI driver will support, William Roberts write: >Disk drives are OK, but they will need to be partitioned in a >way that conforms to the Apple partitioning approach, and then >some extra A/UX stuff done with the A/UX dp utility. Your best >bet is to stick with a disk that is advertised as being >suitable for use with the Macintosh (but then these are pretty >cheap anyway, compared with Sun peripherals and the like). > >Any Mac-compatible disk that doesn't require special things in the >System Folder should work, and so do some of the ones that do. The >SCSI handling under A/UX is more or less generic SCSI commands >and the A/UX system understands big disks just like other UNIX >systems do. A word of caution is in order here. If one is using the drive solely for A/UX, the generic SCSI driver works fine, but one may run into problems with a MacOS partition. Before Jasmine came out with support for A/UX (they do support A/UX now, don't they?), I moved A/UX to a Jasmine DD140 drive (creating a 40MB mac partition and increasing the size of the root A/UX file system. Using the generic SCSI driver A/UX worked flawlessly, but the MacOS hung during disk writes. After some digging, I traced the probem to SCSI write blind commands. By converting write blind requests to write, I eliminated the MacOS write problem. Walt Dixon {arpa: dixon@crd.ge.com } {us mail: ge crd } { po box 8 } { schenectady, ny 12301 } {phone: 518-387-5798 } Walt Dixon dixon@crd.ge.com