#No Shadows!
22 messages in this thread
Don, let me ask you something: does this statement ==> (all?) look
like an assumption? If the exact use and meaning of a question mark
has changed in the English language since I went to school, I'll be
gratefull for the update. Otherwise the iference (you made that one
twice in a row) that I made an assumption is _false_, and kind of
pisses me off. Please re-read my message and note the syntax.
Hey, John, Cool off! don't get pissed off! People, like myself read
these messages and will get the idea that almost all the Adp. cards
will work > 1G. drives. This is not so unless one rigs them with
3rd party drivers or in some cases optional bios. They do indeed
make a few cards that do and you happened to have these. I happen to
have several here I carry for customers and since I'm in the business
of selling these I have to be aware of what is possible and what is
not. I didn't mean to hurt your feelings on this but I have been on
the receiving end of false claims and have had to return product
because a salesman misled me. Like "well it does but you have to buy
COREL SCSI PRO." Have you ever bought that? I found out after the
fact that to get the Adaptec card to go greater than 1G. I'd have to
buy a $495 software pack for a $99 card. And, I didn't mean to jump
on anybody who supports that product either. The 1542 does by itself
and only costs $300. And this is what pisses me off. Misleading
statements by sales people. I certainly didn't intend to piss you
off. I only wanted to point out, in your uncertainty, that Adaptec
does indeed make cards that do not support the > 1 G. drives. And
that to be sure one needs to be specific as to the specs on each
card. I knew that you were unsure and I respect that you are not
the type of individual that would arbitrarily use terms like never,
all, unless you were very sure of yourself.
Let's get on with our work, I know I have to and if you feel my suggestions are
wasting time here then I respect your opinion and will refrain from jumping in
in the future. I could have had another 16 megs of ram for what I spent on
threads like this in the past year! Now I'm beginning to wonder about my
business sanity! <G>
See ya!
Don
I don't wish, for one second, to imply that your input isn't welcome or
worthwhile, I just didn't want to be cannonized for spreading false information
when I thought I communicated well enough to make it understood that I didn't
know if "all" adaptec boards could boot >1gig drives. Anyway, that's cleared
up, and we can go on to bigger and better things, like throwing this IDE hard
drive out the window <g> (180 megs of lost allocation chaines!!!! – I backed
the network up hours before it happened, but a few key files are missing for
some bizarre reason).
John Tissavary (La Luna cie)
Well my 1542B will support > 1GB, but I wouldn't ever want it to for reasons of
speed, large potential disasters, backups, etc.. Can't the people with these
problems just set up a small boot partition for system files, DOS, batch files,
etc., and then set up large workspace partitions up to 1GB ? The drive will
definitely perform much better with smaller partitions and tend to have less
catastophic failures anyway.
<< (180 megs of lost allocation chaines!!!! – I backed the network up hours
before it happened, but a few key files are missing for some bizarre reason).
>>
Oops ! Your arse is bared after all. I konw it's not funny though.
Unfortunately, by the time DOS reports the FAT problems, it's probably too late
– and a recent backup likely would be affected by the yet to be reported
problems. That's why I adopted the somewhat strange concept of *not* backing up
so frequently or doing a second backup not so frequently – the odds are greater
that when DOS reports something wrong (late), you might just have not backed up
recently enough that the backup is good. Between the 2 backup sets, you might
can piece everything back together again. Strange logic from an even stranger
person. <g>
BILL
Actually, since I can pack 10 gigs on each tape, I only do complete network
backups, and I've got the last 20 or so (!) on tape. I could peice the whole
thing back together at once, but I figure when I run into a problem, I'll track
it down, then find the file on tape. Things seem to be running smoothly, now.
I ran a 1.2gig (tiny bit >1gig <g>) HD off a 1542B for a couple of months and
had absolutely no problems. The thing cooked for an ISA controller.
John Tissavary (La Luna cie)
<< Things seem to be running smoothly, now. >>
Good. Glad to hear you got everything put back together.
<< ran a 1.2gig (tiny bit >1gig <g>) HD off a 1542B for a couple of months and
had absolutely no problems. The thing cooked for an ISA controller. >>
It's fine. I've used it for a number of years, since they first came out. I
used to always have to have the latest hardware / software the day they became
available – but I guess I've learned it's usually better to wait until at least
the second or third revision and let your system be stable for a
while……….'course not having as much money as I once did could be part of
the reason too <g>. If it works o.k., it's better than a lot of junk out there
that doesn't work at all – reliably.
BILL
Since mainframe days, there's a well-known, uhm, maybe not so-well-known scheme
for maintaining backups on a rotating "grandfather-father-son" basis such that
you'll always have a stream of complete backups at 3 month intervals, as well
as very recent backups.
John, you aren't old enough to remember mainframe backups, are you? <g> Epoch
backups, 0-level dumps, Tower of Hanoi tape rotation schemes, etc?
I am. <g> (:()
BILL
It's not a question of how old I am, it's how early I got started. 🙂
Of course, I'm not implying that I am old enough, either, but I must have read
about it somewhere. Yea, that's it. Right.
Well, I think I first touched a timeshare teletype in seventh grade, in 1975 or
1976. But by 79, I was rewriting the system software, and swiped my first
"sysop" password in '80. Ah, youth, I learned my lesson and returned to the
path of righteousness. 🙂 And in '81, at college, I was beating out grad
students for programming jobs on campus. In '82, I wrote up a recommendation
that my department go with the DEC Rainbow instead of the IBM PC, since it
could run both CP/M and MS-DOS. Ah, youth again – no wonder I ended up on an
Amiga. 🙂
>>"Can't the people with these problems just set up a small boot partition for
system files, DOS, batch files, etc., and then set up large workspace
partitions up to 1GB ? The drive will definitely perform much better with
smaller partitions…
Bill, just FYI, the problem is not in the logical partitioning, but in access
to the drive at a lower level. Without support for > 1 gig in the controller
bios, FDISK can see ONLY 1 gig, so all space over 1 gig cannot be partitioned
into anything – the extra space just sits there unaccessable.
In my case, I have an upgrade for my 1742 controller on the way.
I agree with your suggestion of a small partition for the part of the disk that
gets the most abuse.
J K J
A good point….<g>…….sorry.
I find that running my IDE's 24 hours per day seem to get 2-3 years out of
them. I'm just now replacing my Seagate 1239A's all six of them. Bought them
when they were about $600 ea. The Conner 545 Meg seems to be a good
replacement, 8 ms. The Seagates are still OK, just small and a little slow.
I've been selling them used for $100. Which brand are you having trouble with?
I collect info like that. <G>
The drive that acted up the other day is a year old Quatum 214meg drive that
sits in my Windows/render slave machine. It's never done this before (except
when Lantastic did a weird number a few months ago), so I don't know if it's
hardware related. I know the IDE controller I was using had faulty floppy
control, so maybe its HD support was the problem. I swapped it for a very fast
Quickpath controller, and haven't had a repeat, yet. I also did a surface
check, and there were no problems detected there.
John Tissavary (La Luna cie)
John;
I saw you spend a lot of time with Rapture and the XAOS TOOLS guys, do you have
an opinion of the program. It kind of looked like Pandemonium on the cheap.
Opionion? Comment?
Dave
DPS
I did spend some time there, didn't I <g>? I was very impressed with what I
saw of it. It's definitely only a small part of Pandemonium, but that will
change over time. They plan on porting most/all of Pandemonium's effects to
IPAS.
What most impressed me about Rapture, besides its beautiful interface (now
THAT'S IPAS!!!!!!!!!!) was the level of control one has over the brushes, and
the super quality of the output. It was tough to judge the product, because
the build we saw had so many features not yet enabled, but I think this is
going to be hot. The fact that one can produce one's own brushes and apply
them in so many ways will change the look of my animations for the better when
I get the product. I believe it will allow me to fine tune, and whack out my
animations and still images the way I want to, and eliminate the hard/clean CGI
"look" when appropriate.
John Tissavary (La Luna cie)
>> besides its beautiful interface (now THAT'S IPAS!!!!!!!!!!) …
John,
All of the new IPAS3 stuff has similar (maybe not so full of options)
interfaces. The reason the old IPAS (2) had that weird looking GUI was because
of the restrictions imposed by the IPAS 2 kit. I'm not saying the Rapture
interface isn't great, it is, but it's just like all of the new stuff coming
out. It's just that you haven't seen any of the other stuff.
You're right, I haven't seen much of what's coming out. Actually, I was
refering to the aesthetics of the interface (pretty shallow, eh?), which I find
nicer than the few IPAS3 things I have seen. As far as functionality goes, I
think Rapture is on course, and I am hoping/expecting that other developers
give us the same kind of power and control over our effects.
John Tissavary (La Luna cie)
Thanks, Don, (and others too) for taking your time to respond to my
question about using my 1.7 gig drive with the Adapetec 1742a EISA
controller. After some research, I found the following on Adeptec's
bulletin board (408-945-2550):
Q: Why can't I use the entire size of my hard drive that is
rated over 1 Gigabyte in capacity, when I am using DOS?
A: DOS 4.x and above has a limitation of 1024 cylinders per
physical drive. This limitation, on current disk controllers
and SCSI HAs that utilize the standard of 1 Megabyte per
cylinder, leads to a 1 Gigabyte limit. Only our 1542B/GIG and
174xA (with special BIOS in Enhanced Mode using ASW-C174 v3.1)
have the ability to break this limit. If your 154xB has a BIOS
part number of 420418-00D or greater, or if your 174xA has a
BIOS part number of 450216-00-A or greater, then you already have
support for more than 1 Gigabyte. Refer to your User's Manual
addendum for help on setting up this feature. Alternatively, users
who need this support can download the latest 154xB or 174x
microcode/BIOS files from this BBS for use with an EPROM burner.
The EPROMs needed are 27C128 at 200ns for the 154xB and 150ns
for the 174x. 154xC boards come ready to support hard drives
larger that 1 Gigabyte.
Tbe bottom of my story is that I needed both a controller bios
upgrade (which Adaptec is sending out at no charge), and an updated
EISA !adp0002.cfg file (which I downloaded from the BBS in the form
of the file ASWC174.EXE) to set the > 1 gig option. So that's that!
Thanks, John, for the excellent documentation on this issue.