aimd@castle.ed.ac.uk (M Davidson) (08/08/90)
A while ago Alan Pratt wrote an interesting letter about what the ST (STE) does when it boots up. He said that upon booting the machine waited 90 seconds for a signal from a hard drive which may be attached to the machine. This time limit could, I think he said, be cut by pressing a key. My hard drive is one of those annoying ones which wont respond at all until it has reached speed. However, I have never been able to get it to autoboot without using a 'sleep' utility. The problem could, of course, be that the drive simply takes longer than 90 seconds to get to speed but, to be honest, I have never noticed my STE wait that long! When I switch on my STE the floppy light is out. The machine waits maybe 10 seconds at the most and then the floppy starts to look for a disk. After that, if there is no disk, it slow boots as my STFM did by checking the disk drive occasionally. Is that the 90 seconds Alan means? This has been annoying me for a while. Is the UK 1.6 rom the same as the US in this respect. Any help appreciated... Mark.