prophet@oxy.edu (Dale Bruce LaFountain) (09/22/90)
Just a couple more quick questions: Should a DMA SCSI card have any effect on Prodos 8 applications if there is no SCSI device connected to the card? I disconnected my defective drive (I plugged it into a Mac and it is indeed dead), and I still can't get any Prodos 8 applications to make it past the version and copyright screen. I'm not sure if this is a feature or a problem; I never bothered to try it before. Common sense suggests that it shouldn't interfere, but since when have peripherals been logical? :-) My other question is: What could possibly happen to a DMA SCSI card while inside the CPU that would cause it to not function correctly? My TransWarp was floating around inside for a few hundred miles of freeway (I have no idea how it got out of the slot; that card fits in pretty tight!), but I couldn't find any markings or indications of damage. If I can't somehow prove that UPS is at fault here, I don't know if they'll like forking out $800 to pay for this problem, along with $500 to replace my lost (?) monitor. Any help would be infinitely appreciated. (Well, at least to some great power of 10, anyway). Thanks in advance again, Dale LaFountain prophet@oxy.edu
AG0514@ALBNYVMS.BITNET (AppleEnthusiast) (09/26/90)
I had a similar problem while awaiting the arival of my HD. Since there was no termination, it failed to work properly. This too may be your problem. I have finally (after 4 months) gotten my hard drive to work with GS/OS. Andrew Goldstein Internet: ag0514@rachel.albany.edu
daveharv@pro-novapple.cts.com (Dave Harvey) (09/28/90)
> I had a similar problem while awaiting the arival of my HD. Since there was > no termination, it failed to work properly. This too may be your problem. I > have finally (after 4 months) gotten my hard drive to work with GS/OS. > Speaking of HD's being terminated, does anyone know the proper termination for the Seagate ST-157N-1? I had a problem with the drive and sent it back to Seagate. They sent me back a reconditioned one and I think that the terminations on the back of the drive are different from the one I sent them. My SCSI card (RAMFast) fails to recognize the drive at all and I think it might be because it's not terminated properly. proline: pro-novapple!daveharv | uucp: crash!pnet01!pro-novapple!daveharv | Pro-novapple BBS arpa: crash!pnet01!pro-novapple!daveharv@nosc.mil | 300/1200/2400/9600 Baud Internet: daveharv@pro-novapple.cts.com | 703-671-0416 | Northern Virginia Apple Users Group | P.O. Box 8211, Falls Church, VA 22041 |
paul@nuchat.UUCP (Paul Hutmacher) (09/30/90)
In article <15565.netnews.info-apple@pro-novapple> daveharv@pro-novapple.cts.com (Dave Harvey) writes: > Speaking of HD's being terminated, does anyone know the proper termination for > the Seagate ST-157N-1? The Seagate st157n-1 drive is terminated internally, i.e. there are three little yellow flat things plugged into the logic board that are the termination for the unit. If you have the bare drive out of its case and look at the board back by the cable you should see them. If the resistor terminator packs are out of the drive it's not terminated. -- paul@nuchat.UUCP {uhnix1, uunet}!nuchat!paul paul%nuchat.uucp@uhnix1.uh.edu
unknown@ucscb.UCSC.EDU (The Unknown User) (10/03/90)
In article <111012@tiger.oxy.edu> prophet@oxy.edu (Dale Bruce LaFountain) writes: >Should a DMA SCSI card have any effect on Prodos 8 applications if there >is no SCSI device connected to the card? I disconnected my defective >drive (I plugged it into a Mac and it is indeed dead), and I still can't >get any Prodos 8 applications to make it past the version and copyright >screen. I'm not sure if this is a feature or a problem; I never bothered >to try it before. Common sense suggests that it shouldn't interfere, but >since when have peripherals been logical? :-) This may be wrong, but I have had the same 'problem'.. What I believe to be the case is that the GS is 'polling' the SCSI card... Since there's no card there, it's hung up (for a while).. If you let it sit for somewhere around 15-30 seconds (I forget for sure), it will then start rebooting slot 5 or whatever slot you have set to boot from. It doesn't matter whether you have Appletalk turned on or slot 7 set to Your Card... It doesn't happen every time I boot, but it happens SOME times. That's what I don't really understand, but it sure seems like it's 'polling' the card... -- / Apple II(GS) Forever! unknown@ucscb.ucsc.edu \ \"If cartoons were meant for adults, they'd be on in prime time."-Lisa Simpson/
toddpw@tybalt.caltech.edu (Todd P. Whitesel) (10/03/90)
unknown@ucscb.UCSC.EDU (The Unknown User) writes: >In article <111012@tiger.oxy.edu> prophet@oxy.edu (Dale Bruce LaFountain) writes: > What I believe to be the case is that the GS is 'polling' the SCSI >card... Since there's no card there, it's hung up (for a while).. > If you let it sit for somewhere around 15-30 seconds (I forget for >sure), it will then start rebooting slot 5 or whatever slot you have >set to boot from. This is correct. When the SCSI card is first turned on it has to wait a minimum of 10 seconds to give SCSI devices time to warm up. The SCSI specification says that a device does not have to be ready to answer ANY requests for ten seconds but must be able to respond after that time. Some peripherals, most notably Apple's Scanner, take about 12 seconds to power up (violating the SCSI spec) so you are supposed to set the DMA SCSI's priority number to 1 or 2 so the card will know you have a scanner and will wait an extra few seconds. (This is a little option added to the card by Apple to make supporting the scanner easier. Beta drivers are mentioned on the cover of the new APDAlog.) This is one of many cases in which the Apple II is fully standard compliant and people wonder what the problem is because Macs AREN'T standard compliant -- and perform better because of it. One performance hack in the Macintosh SCSI manager is the lack of support for arbitration -- the SCSI bus CAN be used as a high speed eight device network, which essentially means that you can connect up to eight computers, scanners, hard drives, or whatever together (make sure there are only two terminators, one at each end of the chain) and all the computers on the chain will be able to share all the devices on the chain. Note that the permanent built in termination on the DMA SCSI card means that only two DMA SCSI cards can be used in such a configuration -- any number of older SCSI cards could be added in between them. This shared bus scheme only works properly if ALL the computers on the network support arbitration, because once the bus has an owner no error checking is made on the transmitted data. I know for a fact that the DMA SCSI supports arbitration, I am not sure if the Rev. C SCSI card does, but I do know for a fact that NO Mac supports arbitration (at least through the built in SCSI port -- third party cards hopefully will be more sensible). This means that a GS and Mac can share hard drives BUT if the Mac wants to use the bus it will simply start using the bus without looking to see if anything else is going on, whether it is a GS or an automatic tape backup unit or even another Mac. Since SCSI does not use data error checking this means corrupted data for anyone using the bus when the Mac wants on, WITH NO ERROR MESSAGE. While the Mac gets faster SCSI performance, it sacrifices the ability to share its SCSI bus with anything other than passive devices. For most people this tradeoff is preferable, however my roommate and I found it annoying as we wanted to share hard drives (he had to clean out parts of his drives to install the stuff from my drive's Mac partition that we wanted to use). While I am bashing the Mac SCSI implementation I suppose I should also mention that Macs will not recognize any SCSI hard disk as formatted unless there is a tiny partition on it called 'APPLE.PARTITION' (or something like that) which contains the actual SCSI driver. So if you want to be able to create Mac partitions create them with Mac HD software and then format the prodos ones from finder. If you partitioned it with the DMA SCSI utilities then the APPLE.PARTITION will be created but it won't have a driver so the Mac software will still insist that the drive is totally blank. The above information was obtained from conversations with Matt Gulick (he designed the DMA SCSI card) and from personal experience and experimentation. I have not dared to attempt actual drive sharing yet. To be fair to the Mac, I realize that these design decisions were probably made by Apple in order to get the Mac Plus's SCSI to work, however I can't understand why they haven't fixed the SCSI manager since then (backwards compatibility maybe?). Todd Whitesel toddpw @ tybalt.caltech.edu
unknown@ucscb.UCSC.EDU (The Unknown User) (10/04/90)
In article <1990Oct3.082855.7591@nntp-server.caltech.edu> toddpw@tybalt.caltech.edu (Todd P. Whitesel) writes: >>unknown@ucscb.UCSC.EDU (The Unknown User) writes: >> What I believe to be the case is that the GS is 'polling' the SCSI >>card... Since there's no card there, it's hung up (for a while).. >> If you let it sit for somewhere around 15-30 seconds (I forget for >>sure), it will then start rebooting slot 5 or whatever slot you have >>set to boot from. > >This is correct. When the SCSI card is first turned on it has to wait a minimum >of 10 seconds to give SCSI devices time to warm up. The SCSI specification says >that a device does not have to be ready to answer ANY requests for ten seconds >but must be able to respond after that time. I'm glad you agree with my reasoning for the wait, yet from some things you've said I believe you possibly are talking about something different. The original poster and I are talking about a wait AFTER the PRODOS text screen comes up(i.e. ProDOS 8 1.8 or whatever and copyright notice).. At that screen, the GS -sometimes- pauses for ~15-30 seconds...And it doesn't matter if it's a cold or warm boot from what I remember. It does NOT do it always though which is really really odd. If you let it sit there (which I didn't the first few times.. it scared me that something was wrong), then it will keep booting slot 5 in a little while. Not the same thing as the bootup wait.. And as I said in my original message, it does this occassional wait whether you have slot 7 to AppleTalk or Your Card.. It only does it with the SCSI Card in there though obviously. -- / Apple II(GS) Forever! unknown@ucscb.ucsc.edu \ \"If cartoons were meant for adults, they'd be on in prime time."-Lisa Simpson/
toddpw@tybalt.caltech.edu (Todd P. Whitesel) (10/04/90)
Ok, I tried it out and checked. Mine does not delay at the Prodos message but I remember it did when I had SCSI.PART installed. What it is in fact doing is building a list of online devices (including partitions) which SCSI.PART forces every time you run PRODOS that has been patched by it. Under normal prodos the card will only recognize the boot drive's partition at first but as soon as you access a different prefix or do an ONLINE call it will build that list and it has to check each device on the bus (seven possible) and give each at least 2 or 3 seconds (forget which) so you are looking at a nasty wait. I thought about patching the card's firmware to fix this by only looking for one drive ID (mine) but when I mentioned it to Matt Gulick he said 'good luck about finding the loop' so I am not too inclined to try it. There's a 32K ROM in the SCSI card bank-switched in 1K chunks so disassembling the bugger could get really messy... Todd Whitesel toddpw @ tybalt.caltech.edu
prophet@oxy.edu (Dale Bruce LaFountain) (10/05/90)
To all who responded to my HD problems posted a week (or so ) ago: Thanks for all the tips, but the problem fixed itself. After declaring my drive dead and confirming it by plugging it into a Mac+, I was forced to reinstall my SCSI card and HD to show UPS that it didn't work. To my great surprise (and UPS's relief) my HD came up with no problems. All partitions verified with 0 problems. To this day I still don't know what was wrong with it. Has anyone ever heard of a Quantum mechanism getting jammed in the 'parked' position? Does the Mac have some initialization parameters that it passes to the SCSI device on startup that my GS doesn't? BTW, I didn't plug the drive back into my GS after I checked it on the Mac; it was 3 days later when UPS was on their way over. Hmmm. Anyway, thanks for the help guys. Any insights on the cause of my problem would be appreciated, as I expect to see this again the next time I move. Oh, one more thing. I am still having problems with my ImageWriter II. The gear that controls the line/form feed of the platen seems to be screwed. Does anyone know ANYTHING about these damn printers? This one is only about 2 years old, and worked flawlessly until about two days ago. HELP!! Please respond via e-mail. Thanks, Dale LaFountain prophet@oxy.edu
bbs@bluemoon.UUCP (BBS login) (10/06/90)
The wait you see when booting a floppy IS the SCSI card still. ProDOS and GS/OS both call all slot-based firmware device drivers to initialize them at OS startup. With the High Speed SCSI card, this still causes a wait after the P8 startup screen appears. On subsequent boots the delay might not occur if the SCSI card remembers that no devices were attached. (I'm not sure if this is something that it usually does or if software could do something to cause it to "forget".)
russotto@eng.umd.edu (Matthew T. Russotto) (10/06/90)
In article <113674@tiger.oxy.edu> prophet@oxy.edu (Dale Bruce LaFountain) writes: >Has anyone ever heard of a Quantum mechanism getting jammed in the 'parked' >position? Yes-- it was a problem with the lubricant absorbing water and getting too viscous. There is a rom upgrade for the problem, if you have a drive with the right serial number. -- Matthew T. Russotto russotto@eng.umd.edu russotto@wam.umd.edu .sig under construction, like the rest of this campus.
unknown@ucscb.UCSC.EDU (The Unknown User) (10/08/90)
In article <XkHLq1w163w@bluemoon.UUCP> bbs@bluemoon.UUCP (BBS login) writes: >The wait you see when booting a floppy IS the SCSI card still. ProDOS and >GS/OS both call all slot-based firmware device drivers to initialize them >at OS startup. With the High Speed SCSI card, this still causes a wait >after the P8 startup screen appears. On subsequent boots the delay might >not occur if the SCSI card remembers that no devices were attached. (I'm >not sure if this is something that it usually does or if software could do >something to cause it to "forget".) I still don't really understand why it acts the weird way it does. As I've said before, it doesn't do it all of the time upon bootup (or warm boot or anything)... It does it SOMETIMES and I can't figure out why.. I think it might be if I try to boot without a disk in the drive, but that's a rare thing... Then after that it pauses at the ProDOS screen.. This is just a guess.. I'm just trying to clarify what it does for ME, which doesn't seem to be the same things as it does to other people. -- / Apple II(GS) Forever! unknown@ucscb.ucsc.edu \ \"If cartoons were meant for adults, they'd be on in prime time."-Lisa Simpson/