SHBOUM@MACALSTR.EDU (01/13/91)
First of all, I'd like to thank everyone who responded to my question
about installing GS/OS on a RAM Drive. I never thought that the drive had to
be reformatted to have the boot blocks. Of course, it never occured to me that
they weren't there in the first place. Why does the Ram Disk work this way?
Also, just a couple more questions that I forgot to ask in the last message.
1) Although I do not currently own a hard drive yet {getting there!},
I am interested to know if you can change the partition to boot off of. This
would be really helpful because then you could boot to a Prodos 8 system to
run the programs that would not work under GS/OS, among other things. I
remember when the old Sider drives use to talk about their DOS 3.3 partitions,
but under ProDOS, the partition would be next to useless except for the
storage of files, so they had to have a way to boot to it.
2) Is the 32 Meg Partition size for hard drives the absolute maximum
for the II series, or is that just what ProDOS is limited to right now? If it
isn't, can ProDOS or GS/OS to be modified to handle larger volumes? I remember
a few years ago, the Mac had a similar problem where the largest volume it
could have was 64 Megs, but Apple fixed that...
3) To the ellusive person who has the FTA programming manual, I'd
really like to get a copy of it as well!!!
Thanks again,
Hal
| Hal Bouma | Working on a sig...
| Macalester College |
| Mail to: SHBOUM@MACALSTR.EDU |ericm@sage.cc.purdue.edu (Eric Mulholland) (01/14/91)
In article <D5F5EEBA41BF004B93@MACALSTR.EDU> SHBOUM@MACALSTR.EDU writes: > 1) Although I do not currently own a hard drive yet {getting there!}, >I am interested to know if you can change the partition to boot off of. This I may be mistaken, but I think the Volcans can do this. The new rom for the RamFast is expected to have this. >would be really helpful because then you could boot to a Prodos 8 system to >run the programs that would not work under GS/OS, among other things. I Booting GS/OS or directly to ProDos 8 can be done on one partition. In Nibble a year ago, they printed a program called Smartboot 8/16 (not to be confussed with another program called Smartboot) that checks the caps lock key when you boot and depending on its postion, which OS you get. I use it a lot, one example is when I install a desk accesary that crashes the system when I boot. I just press the caps, reboot and tell basic.system to delete that file. (Works as long as it isn't forked) > 2) Is the 32 Meg Partition size for hard drives the absolute maximum >for the II series, or is that just what ProDOS is limited to right now? If it It's a limit of ProDos and without other FSTs for directly connected hard drives, the limit for GS/OS as well. > 3) To the ellusive person who has the FTA programming manual, I'd >really like to get a copy of it as well!!! It sounds like a great book, I haven't heard any word from the person making the translation. I hope it is still going through, I'd like to snatch up a copy myself. ____ Y_,_|[]| Eric Mulholland {|_|_|__| ericm@sage.cc.purdue.edu //oo--OO ...!pur-ee!sage.cc!ericm
gwyn@smoke.brl.mil (Doug Gwyn) (01/15/91)
In article <D5F5EEBA41BF004B93@MACALSTR.EDU> SHBOUM@MACALSTR.EDU writes: >I am interested to know if you can change the partition to boot off of. I think that initial "cold boot" works only from the boot blocks for the whole drive. Perhaps you may be able to set the boot block contents to search for ProDOS on the desired partition, but I don't know exactly how to go about that. Note that an unmodified ProDOS-8 cannot access more than two partitions on a given SCSI disk. >Is the 32 Meg Partition size for hard drives the absolute maximum >for the II series, or is that just what ProDOS is limited to right now? It's built into the file system structure itself; not even GS/OS is able to get around this for a ProDOS file system. However, GS/OS can support other file system formats that don't have that limitation. Currently, the only GS/OS File System Translator of that kind is the AppleShare one. There have long been rumors that a (Macintosh) HFS File System Translator for GS/OS is in the works, but it hasn't been released. By the way, MS-DOS file systems also have a 32MB partition limit, for reasons similar to the ProDOS limit.