Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.emulations
Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!hobbes.physics.uiowa.edu!news.iastate.edu!vaxf.iastate.edu!TAAB5
From: taab5@isuvax.iastate.edu (Marc Barrett)
Subject: Hard Drive Problems w/A-Max II
Message-ID: <1991Jun3.051318.9629@news.iastate.edu>
Sender: news@news.iastate.edu (USENET News System)
Reply-To: taab5@isuvax.iastate.edu
Organization: Iowa State University, Ames, IA.
Date: Mon, 3 Jun 1991 05:13:18 GMT
Lines: 56


   I've been having major problems with using A-Max II with a hard drive
ever since I got A-Max II, and have finally decided to ask about it 
here.

   When I first got A-Max II, I reformmated my hard disk and set everything
up exactly according to the A-Max II manual; IE: with two Amiga partitions,
one for my Amiga stuff and one called "AMAX:" for A-Max II.  (I then had a
30M Seagate ST131N, so I did not lose much when I reformatted the hard
drive)  After I got everything going, A-Max II worked, except that it
would periodically hang during a read or write operation involving the
hard drive.  This happened often enough to be very annoying.

   A couple of weeks ago, I got a used ST296N.  At first I set everything
up exactly as with the ST131N.  I then experienced exactly the same 
problems with the hard drive hanging under A-Max II, except that these
problems were far more frequent.  I could hardly ever even boot the
MAC OS without it hanging during the startup.

   I now have the system set up in a fairly clever manner.  I used a
package called "Disk Manager MAC" (an original copy, of course) to
get the hard drive running under both A-Max I and A-Max II.  DMM is
a package originally meant for genuine MACs, which Interactive Video
Systems bought and modified so that users of their TrumpCard HD 
controller (which I have) could use their hard drives under the
original A-Max.  I created a dummy mountlist entry sdo that the MAC
partition created with DMM could be used with A-Max II.

   The result is that the hard drive now works absolutely beautifully
and flawlessly under A-Max I, but still hangs under A-Max II.  This
is annoying, because I would like to be able to use many of the
improvements of A-Max II, such as the sound emulation and the new
File Transfer II (which does not work under A-Max I).

   Now for my question: is there any way that I can disable all of 
the new hard drive routines in A-Max II?  The reason is that there
is something in A-Max II that is keeping the modified Disk Manager
MAC software from working under A-Max II.  If I could somehow throw
out all of the new hard drive routines in A-Max II, I could use
the DMM software to get the hard drive working the way it works with
A-Max I, and still have all of the other nice improvements of A-Max II.
 
   One final note: I tested the compatibility of my system under 
A-Max II versus A-Max I.  Under A-Max I, nearly every MAC SCSI-related
program I threw at it ran flawlessly, while none of these programs
ran at all under A-Max II.  So it seems that, with my system at
least, A-Max I is far more compatible with a genuine MAC than is
A-Max II.

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