CompuServe Messages

Hi Jim, Yes, it can be confusing. CBM first came out with the A2090 controller card. This card was able to talk to two ST-506 HD and seven SCSI devices. Everybody was using 1.2 WB, and this never offered any means to boot up from any device other than DF0:. With WB 1.3, CBM devised a method to boot from devices other than DF0:. At about this time, the A2090 controller was updated to include two EPROMs, the ones that allowed you to boot from the hard disk. This board was called the A2090A. To add to the confusion, CBM was supposed to come out with a board with the two EPROMs in it that would plug into the next zorro slot to allow booting from the older A2090 boards. This board never materialized. The EPROMs contained a form of the hddisk.device on board so the system knew how to access the HD. The booting process required use of the first two CYLINDERS of the HD. In this space information was kept about the size of the next PARTITION, most likely called your BOOT partition, and this is where your WB stuff is usually kept. This BOOT partition was kept small in size (a few MB), and the rest of the HD was set up as another partition (WORK). But the information for this bigger partition was not kept in the first two cylinders, but rather is kept in your DEVS: directory in the MOUNTLIST file. Go take a look now….. Please note, I may have used the word "boot" above incorrectly. The first two cylinders on the HD (set up with the program called PREP, comes on the A2090A floppy disk) allow the first partition to be AUTOMOUNTED. This means the entries in the MOUNTLIST are not required to mount this first partion, only additional partitions. As to whether you can BOOT from the AUTOMOUNTED partition will depend on what is on there. I am not sure if the first HD you have must be the one you BOOT from or not. If you have multiple HDs, then they can all be AUTOMOUNTED if you use PREP to set up the first two cylinders of all the HDs, or you can use the MOUNTLIST to mount the additional drives. If you AUTOMOUNT them, you are stuck using the old slow file system. If you MOUNTLIST them, you can use the newer faster FastFileSystem. Do you have PREP? You really need to use this with the A2090 or A2090A controllers. These boards don't talk to the system in the proper manner programs such as HDTOOLBOX uses (the standard was set/changed after the A2090A was made). When I used HDTOOLBOX from 2.04 WB, it usually meant a crash when it scanned the SCSI devices. Tried the HDTOOLBOX from 2.1 (don't have 3.1 here) and it was able to scan the SCSI devices (after doing the SCSI_DEVICE_NAME=hddisk.device), and recognize I had something as SCSI device 0, but didn't know what it was. I think HDTOOLBOX is only for HD controllers using the RigidDiskBlock method (after the A2090A was made). At the time I upgraded from 1.3 to 2.04, my ST506 drive died, so I bought a quantum 105 SCSI to replace it with. I used PREP, and told it the drive had four surfaces, 49 blocks/track, and a total of 1048 cylinders (0-1047). PREP used up the first two cylinders for it's use, and I made a very small BOOT partition – cylinders two to ten, for a size of 839K (I kept bare minimum in here, and transfered over to a larger WB partition – didn't want to be using the old file system. Used ASSIGN to transfer most everything to the real WB partition, except DEVS: – kept it in the boot partition) Had two more partitions on the HD. One was the real WB, the other a larger working partition. Here is the mountlist I use for them: WB: Device = hddisk.device FileSystem = l:FastFileSystem Unit = 3 Flags = 0 Surfaces = 4 BlocksPerTrack = 49 Reserved = 2 Interleave = 0 LowCyl = 11 ; HighCyl = 160 Buffers = 30 GlobVec = -1 BufMemType = 1 Mount = 1 DosType = 0x444F5301 StackSize = 4000 # HD2: Device = hddisk.device FileSystem = l:FastFileSystem Unit = 3 Flags = 0 Surfaces = 4 BlocksPerTrack = 49 Reserved = 2 Interleave = 0 LowCyl = 161 ; HighCyl = 1047 Buffers = 100 GlobVec = -1 BufMemType = 1 Mount = 1 DosType = 0x444F5301 StackSize = 4000 # Notice the UNIT number is equal to 3. This is because this is SCSI device ZERO. UNIT 1 is ST-506 #1, UNIT 2 is ST-506 #2, UNIT 3 is SCSI device 0, UNIT 4 is SCSI device 2, and so on, up to UNIT 9 = SCSI device 7. You need (should already have) "hddisk" and hddisk.info" in your WB:Expansion drawer. You need PREP to set up the first two cylinders. And you need a MOUNLTIST entry in your DEVS: drawer for any partitions beyond the first automounted one, or for any HDs that are not automounted. This may be the best option for the big SCSI drive you are going to buy – mount it with the mountlist so it can use the FastFileSystem (must be in the wb:l directory, assigned as l: ) Let me know if you need a copy of the A2090 manual (that's what came with my A2090A board) and/or the A2090A floppy with PREP on it. Course, I can EMAIL you the files from the disk – be quicker. Mail from here would take a few days to get to you. 73, Kelly