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From: cyliax@ecn.purdue.edu (Ingo Cyliax)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: floppy drives / old cubes
Message-ID: <1991Feb5.135323@ecn.purdue.edu>
Date: 5 Feb 91 18:53:23 GMT
References: <1991Feb5.153658.24248@athena.mit.edu> <1991Feb5.134244@ecn.purdue.edu>
Sender: news@noose.ecn.purdue.edu (USENET news)
Reply-To: cyliax@ecn.purdue.edu (Ingo Cyliax)
Organization: Purdue University Engineering Computer Network
Lines: 35

In article <1991Feb5.153658.24248@athena.mit.edu>, jnicolas@athena.mit.edu
(Julien J Nicolas) writes:
|> Hi everyone!
|> 
|> This is mostly aimed at old cube owners...Now that most of the third
|> party software and upgrades is going to be distributed on diskettes, I
|> am curious to find out what old cube owners are doing: buying an
|> external floppy disk drive (e.g. the PLI drive at $500), installing an
|> internal drive (which would require getting a new face plate -NeXT seems
|> unwilling to provide them), using the E-net to download the software
|> from other machines, waiting for something better to come along :), or
|> not doing anything...  What is the general opinion? 


I have been using an external SCSI floppy drive, which I assembled myself
using a Teac 235JS-401 2.88Mb SCSI floppy and some powersupply/case I just
happened to have laying around. I also had to write some software to init
and format the drive as well as being able to read the drive raw (i.e.
without a NeXT filesystem on it).

This worked OK under 1.0, but I just installed 2.0 last night and I'm
trying to figure out how to tell the "automounter" not to poll the SCSI 
floppy and try to mount the drive as soon as I insert the floppy. It also
wants to initiliase the drive if it doesn't contain a NeXT filesystem.
This of course fails, since the NeXT SCSI driver doesn't know about this 
particular type of drive and then tries to spit it back out. I'll have
to dig into this.

If you're interested, let me know and I might post/E-Mail some more info.
after I get it all running under 2.0. 

-ingo

--
/* Ingo Cyliax, Home: (317) 474-0031, E-Mail: cyliax@flaubert.laf.in.US */