3rd party disk and tape drives (was Re: Does nobody read this group?

[Richard Todd]

In article <235 at inpnms.UUCP> logan at inpnms.UUCP (Jim Logan) writes:
>question.  Can anyone tell me how painful it is to use disk drives
>and QIC tape drives from other vendors under A/UX?

>My local dealer is over-charging me for everything, and I'm not
>confident that he knows what he's doing when in comes to A/UX,
>therefore I'll be buying the IIci and A/UX on tape from him (the
>cheapest place around) and buy the RAM upgrade, 300MB disk, and
>150MB QIC tape drive through mail-order.
  1st point.  *Don't* buy A/UX on tape.  Apple only ships A/UX on the 
cartridges their overpriced tape drive uses (40M DC2000A, if I recall
rightly), and the cartridge will almost certainly not fit in your 150M tape
drive.  Go ahead and order A/UX on floppy.  Sure, the floppy shuffle is a 
pain, but it's only 25 disks or so, and an evening of floppy shuffling 
beats paying for Apple's tape drive.  

>I don't know if the A/UX SCSI driver will support any old big
>SCSI disk I plug in.  Does the format program know how to format
>a disk this large?  
   It seems to work fine on most of them.  This message is coming from
a Mac IIx with a 300M MiniScribe disk attached to it, most of which is a
big A/UX partition.  I haven't used the A/UX formatting software (I'm not
even sure there is any).  General consensus on the net is that you want to
buy a copy of LaCie's SilverLining formatting/partitioning program and use
that.  I did, and it seems to work quite well.  LaCie's Silverlining allows
you to create both A/UX and MacOS partitions on the same disk.
Silverlining is only $70, and well worth it.  

>                    Does the SCSI tape driver know how to talk to
>anything besides the Apple 40MB tape drive?  
  No.  Their driver apparently talks to Apple tape drives only.  I've
tried both a TEAC 150M tape drive and a Tandberg cartridge tape drive
on it.  No dice, the Apple driver won't even recognize it.  The marketing
dweebs win one for their side...
  Fortunately, somebody out there is apparently writing a PD A/UX driver
for the TEAC tape drives.  Don't know too many details about this, as I 
only just heard about it yesterday.  I gather the driver is still in beta
test.  

>  Can I boot from this
>external 300MB drive?  Can I leave the Finder on my 40MB internal
>drive so I can use it sometimes?
  Not only can you leave a MacOS (Finder) partition on your 40M internal,
you *have* to have a MacOS partition on at least one of your drives.
The way A/UX boots is first the machine boots MacOS and then runs the
MacOS "Set Startup" application, which is usually set to the A/UX sash
(standalone shell), which then proceeds to boot Unix.  So you need a 
MacOS partition somewhere on your system at least big enough to hold the
standalone shell and its associated files (a couple meg or so).  So yes
you can leave the Finder on your 40M internal, in fact it may be simplest
to just put the sash stuff there and leave your external drive entirely
for Unix.  Sash has options for specifying a Unix boot device different
than the one for MacOS.  I haven't tried that sort of a setup, but I'd be
real surprised if it didn't work.  
--
Richard Todd	rmtodd at uokmax.ecn.uoknor.edu  rmtodd at chinet.chi.il.us
	rmtodd at servalan.uucp
Motorola Skates On Intel's Head!