CompuServe Messages

Pat: The important thing here is the ROM revisions in the actual SyQuest drives. Some of the earlier ones had a problem with reselection (sometimes called disconnect/reconnect). On these drives if reselection wasn't specifically turned off they would have trouble formatting cartridges, and disk access would be even slower than floppies! 🙁 If reselection is turned off these troubles go away. I know that there's a way to turn off reselection using Microbotics RDPrep software (which they've released as freeware, and is in the libs in the AmigaVendor forum), and I know that GVP's fastprep software also supports turning off reselection, but I don't know how you would do it with HDToolBox that comes with the A3000. I use RDPrep, and have for a long time (before I got my 3000 I had a hardframe in my A2000), and I think it's the finest software available for partitioning drives, and it writes out a full RDB as well. (many programs don't use all the available options in the RDB, so they don't even write those out, GVP & ICD are 2 that I know of that do that). If your friend still has trouble with his drive after setting reselection to off, then he might have a problem with the drive. If you have any other questions regarding this, feel free to ask me, as I originally had a drive that didn't support reselection, and I'm familiar with some of the things needed to do to get around the problem. I now have a 44 meg SyQuest that DOES support reselection, and let me tell you, it makes a world of difference. In case you aren't familiar with reselection, as an example, I use the GnuTar program to backup my HDs to tape, and on a drive with reselection ON the machine can read from the drive as it writes to the tape. On a drive with reselection OFF the system would have to first read the HD, then write to the tape, then once the write is done, go back and read from the HD again, etc, etc, so if you can use reselection, you can speed up some operations on the machine. // -Mike Schiller \X/ AMIGA! On AutoPilot in sunny Fort Lauderdale