[comp.sys.apple2] Problem with High Speed SCSI Card

V2071A@VM.TEMPLE.EDU ("George A. Piotrowski Jr") (07/14/90)

I have been having problems installing an Apple // High speed SCSI card in
my Apple ][gs.  I have a homemade HD with an 85meg Seagate HD in a Tulin case.
I have been running with the Rev C card for about a year now with no problems.
When I install the card into my GS (have tried slot 1, 2, 7), I get a 70-30
chance of not booting.  I get either crashes into the monitor or I get a
Relocation/Configuration error.  I have set up Prosel-8 on my hd to bootup
first.  Then I have an option on the Prosel Menu to run a Basic Program to
run the Prodos file for GSOS.(I tried to set this file up directly in Prosel-8
but it would boot)  This setup has worked fine for a year.  When i get the
computer booted into ProDOS-8, I try to boot into GSOS and it crashes about
3/4 of the time.  Most of the time, it beeps and the thermonoter keeps going.

FYI, the rest of my system contains a Rev D GS-Ram card with 1.5 megs.  I
first thought the problem was using the card in slot 1, but when I tried it
ion slot 7, I got the same results.  Also, when I went back to the Rev C card,
with the new drivers (already installed from the disk with the DMA card), I
could not use appletalk off the same slot as I have been before with the old
drivers.

I have tried both the DMA on and off, and got the same results.

My main question is, Do I have to or should I reformat the drive with
the Advanced Disk Util with the new drivers installed???  I was hoping that I
wouldn't have to because the combined partitions take up about 65-70 meg and
I am not too anxious to spend the time to backup it up right now.

I used the HDformat program available from Brown to do a low-level format of
the HD.

If anyone has had any experiences with the High Speed SCSI DMA card and home
brew HD's good and bad, please let me know.

Thanks in advance,
________________________________________________________________________

George A. Piotrowski, Coordinator          Bitnet: V2071A@TEMPLEVM
Educational Computing Center             Internet: v2071a@vm.temple.edu
Temple University                  America Online: GaPio
Philadelphia, PA 19122                 Compu$erve: 74046,1304
(215) 787-6228                              Genie: G.PIOTROWSKI

Doc Brown: Obviously, the Time Continuum has be disrupted creating this
New Temporal Event Sequence resulting in this Alternate Reality!
________________________________________________________________________
Acknowledge-To: <V2071A@VM.TEMPLE.EDU>

gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn) (07/16/90)

In article <9007161342.AA06400@apple.com> V2071A@VM.TEMPLE.EDU ("George A. Piotrowski Jr") writes:
>If anyone has had any experiences with the High Speed SCSI DMA card and home
>brew HD's good and bad, please let me know.

Mine works fine.  "Homebrew" has essentially nothing to do with it,
unless you were sloppy and made a bad cable or something like that;
all that most of the third-party packed drives are is a drive with
embedded SCSI controller, case, power supply, and connectors.  That's
essentially the same as a homebrew drive system.

You shouldn't have to reformat the drive.

From the sounds of it, you have either a DMA or a memory usage problem.
Disable ALL third-party Desk Accessories, and if it still crashes upon
booting, suspect DMA compatibility problems.  Most memory cards had such
a problem until the most recent revisions, and the TWGS also had a DMA
problem that requires a PAL upgrade to fix.

UD182050@NDSUVM1.BITNET (Mike Aos) (07/17/90)

I have a Rodime 45M drive stuck in a Chinook CT-30 case that worked just fine
with the Revision C card, but has yet to work with the DMA card.  I've done
everything by-the-book, but it still refuses to work consistantly.  The rest
of my system consists of a TWGS (latest), GS-Ram+ (latest w/2M) and a stereo
card.  Anyway, it refuses to let me make certain partition sizes, but it will
allow me to make a 10.5/32/.5 setup, and that SEEMS to work fine (any other
size and one of the volumes becomes impossible to initialize).  I can verify
the disks from the Finder (and lots of other utilities) and everything is fine
'till I start to write to it.  Then it (mainly the boot volume) develops bad
blocks.  After a little messing around, the whole thing will refuse to
initialize and I'm forced to reformat with Finder (1:1).  I've tried setting
DMA off, and it copies things to the disk better, but I still have some
bad blocks, and pretty soon the partitions deteriorate to the point that they
can no longer be initialized.  I've been trying for about 4 days now, with
seemingly every possible combination.  The drive has been formatted umpteen
times at 1:1, 2:1, with SCSI Utilities, and even a little on a Mac (I don't
know a lot about Mac's, I just tried some PD stuff I found on an FTP site).

If anyone has any insite into this I'd REALLY like to hear from you.  I thought
my problem was the TWGS but I even took it out for a while and never noticed
any improvement.  On the rare occasions I got the DMA card working with a good
partition I got some STUNNING Linear read times.

Mike