taab5@isuvax.iastate.edu (Marc Barrett) (06/03/91)
I've been having major problems with using A-Max II with a hard drive ever since I got A-Max II, and have finally decided to ask about it here. When I first got A-Max II, I reformmated my hard disk and set everything up exactly according to the A-Max II manual; IE: with two Amiga partitions, one for my Amiga stuff and one called "AMAX:" for A-Max II. (I then had a 30M Seagate ST131N, so I did not lose much when I reformatted the hard drive) After I got everything going, A-Max II worked, except that it would periodically hang during a read or write operation involving the hard drive. This happened often enough to be very annoying. A couple of weeks ago, I got a used ST296N. At first I set everything up exactly as with the ST131N. I then experienced exactly the same problems with the hard drive hanging under A-Max II, except that these problems were far more frequent. I could hardly ever even boot the MAC OS without it hanging during the startup. I now have the system set up in a fairly clever manner. I used a package called "Disk Manager MAC" (an original copy, of course) to get the hard drive running under both A-Max I and A-Max II. DMM is a package originally meant for genuine MACs, which Interactive Video Systems bought and modified so that users of their TrumpCard HD controller (which I have) could use their hard drives under the original A-Max. I created a dummy mountlist entry sdo that the MAC partition created with DMM could be used with A-Max II. The result is that the hard drive now works absolutely beautifully and flawlessly under A-Max I, but still hangs under A-Max II. This is annoying, because I would like to be able to use many of the improvements of A-Max II, such as the sound emulation and the new File Transfer II (which does not work under A-Max I). Now for my question: is there any way that I can disable all of the new hard drive routines in A-Max II? The reason is that there is something in A-Max II that is keeping the modified Disk Manager MAC software from working under A-Max II. If I could somehow throw out all of the new hard drive routines in A-Max II, I could use the DMM software to get the hard drive working the way it works with A-Max I, and still have all of the other nice improvements of A-Max II. One final note: I tested the compatibility of my system under A-Max II versus A-Max I. Under A-Max I, nearly every MAC SCSI-related program I threw at it ran flawlessly, while none of these programs ran at all under A-Max II. So it seems that, with my system at least, A-Max I is far more compatible with a genuine MAC than is A-Max II. ------------------------------------------------------------- / Marc Barrett -MB- | BITNET: XGR39@ISUVAX.BITNET / / ISU COM S Student | Internet: XGR39@CCVAX.IASTATE.EDU / ------------------------------------------------------------ \ ISU : The Home of the Goon / \ Who wants to Blow Up the Moon / -------------------------------------------------------