Floptical disk
2 messages in this thread
Here's one for you mountlist experts, I have an Insite Floptical disk and a GVP
HC8+ SCSI controller, and I want to know how to setup the drive. What's
required is a mountlist entry using the GVP scsi driver, and enabling me to
access a 21mb floptical. However, here's the good bit, the Insite Floptival
drive also allows you to access 1.44mb PC disks. Therefore, can I have a
mountlist entry that lets me have 1.76mb Amiga floppys ?? Yes, I do have
Kickstart 2.04 and yes, I realise I'll probably need to use the diskchange
program to let Amigados know I've changed disks (between flopticals and HD
disks). Can anyone help ?? Betty where are you ? Cheers Steve Gardiner ;-] PS –
I've got the tech docs, so I know the cylinders etc, but the mountlistentries
for the GVP device driver are a bit of a mystery. i.e What's the MASK value ???
Steve: I've got an Insite floptical but I don't think you can set it up to
handle 1.76mb Amiga drives, though it certainly would be worth trying to
write a mountlist for that. Let me know if you succeed! Meanwhile, bear
this in mind: Since the Insite reads 720K and 1.44 meg PC disks without
trouble, you can transparently use those for Amiga storage with two
limitations: You must have CrossDOS (included in WB 2.1 up) running on
your system and set up to auto-activate. Then, you can read and write
Amiga files right to those cheap, preformatted 1.44meg IBM diskettes. The
only major drawback: You'll be stuck with the MS-DOS 8.3 file-naming
limitation. The good news is that CrossDOS will automatically clip
lengthier file names down when you copy, move or save a file to the
diskette.
On my system, this is all seamless and pretty much automatic. My floptical
*usually* detects a disk change without intervention, but sometimes I have
to help it along with DISKCHANGE or SCSIMounter (a freeware utility).
Usually this is only a problem when I'm switching from a 20-meg floptical
to another sized disk.
I address high-density MS-DOS disks as IBMHD: and use a mountlist adapted
from the CrossDOS manual for that as per the following:
/* CrossDOS file system entry
*
* This file enables CrossDOS on the built-in floppy drive normally
* referred to as DF0:. PC1 does the same for DF1. By creating new *
versions of this file and changing the Unit line to use other * numbers,
you can * make CrossDOS available on other devices. For example, changing
the value * of Unit to 2 would create a mount file that would enable
CrossDOS on DF2. */
FileSystem = L:CrossDOSFileSystem
Device = scsi.device
Unit = 2
Flags = 0
Surfaces = 2
BlocksPerTrack = 18
Reserved = 1
Interleave = 0
LowCyl = 0
HighCyl = 79
Buffers = 5
BufMemType = 0
StackSize = 600
Priority = 5
GlobVec = -1
DosType = 0x4D534400
[ Above saved to the DEVS:DosDrivers drawer as a file named IBMHD. The
icon for this should set the tooltype ACTIVATE=1 and use C:Mount as its
default tool. ]
BTW, I *also* use the floptical as a hard disk device for my AMAX II
board. The Mac side of the system finds it as a SCSI device, no problem.
And of course via CrossDOS you could also read and write other odd
formats, such as Atari-formatted disks.
his floptical has really become an omnidrive in my system!
— Ron Legro / MILWAUKEE WI USA
via Amiga Autopilot 1.72 — the only way to fly