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From: dave@rocksvax.FUN (Dave Sewhuk,840-5H,76248,2883513)
Newsgroups: net.micro.mac
Subject: Re: MacSCSI problems
Message-ID: <370002@rocksvax.FUN>
Date: Tue, 26-Nov-85 16:16:00 EST
Article-I.D.: rocksvax.370002
Posted: Tue Nov 26 16:16:00 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 28-Nov-85 03:22:51 EST
References: <170@brand.UUCP>
Organization: Xerox, Henrietta
Lines: 51

/* rocksvax:net.micro.mac / weber@brand.UUCP (Allan G. Weber) /  1:47 pm  Nov 20, 1985 */
I had this problem early on.  My cable in the Mac was a little loose and not
all the command signals made it.

    About the disk ICON not appearing, I found a serious bug in the initialize
disk routine.  I wrote a quick hack which allows me to cycle through all the
steps individually to help me find problems. It is a crummy un-Mac-like
program but it is was quick and dirty.  It allowed me to cycle reads and write so that I could use a scope to watch to SCSI bus.

If you look in the code that initializes block #2 you will see something like
	while (mumble, p=mumble; p<&p_lastbyte ; p++);
		      should read
	while (mumble, p=&mumble; p<=&p_lastbyte ; p++);
				   ^
    I know for a fact that the drive will not mount if a lower case 'd'
sat in the last byte of that parameter block.

    Also note that ScsiIn() always reads in chunks of 8 bytes no matter
what value you request.  It gets rounded up to next set of 8 bytes.

    I had the thing running in about 2 days.  Also I still have not been
able to figure out how to make it start up using an MANX system disk.
I had to take a generic system disk, Set Startup MountSCSI and boot
to the finder and do a OPT-SHIFT Finder to run from the disk.  I
have the same problem using mountRam.   Starting the Shell from
the Finder makes all work well for me.  Once I got that running all
has been running well for me.  I think that the SHELL fragments memory
badly so that it cannot load some important thing in memory when you
switch system files.  I noticed that it tended to grab most of the free
memory when I ran a show free mem desk acc.

    BTW, I am using a SMS FW5000 controller (I also tried an OMT10) with
a Quantum Q2020 drive.

My system has been very stable, but I have only run it less than a week.  I
was amazed how quickly things went together.  Overall, I think the FastTime
interface is a nice piece of work, although it took them a long
time to ship mine.  It sure is fun to have every font, every desk acc,
every game, and stuff on one disk and have 2000K free. It does appear to run
about as fast as a hyperdrive.  My MacWrite startup took about 6 sec instead
of 5.5 that their ad claims.  When I get things tuned a little better
I ought to be able to meet or beat that one!!

Running the hard disk shaves a bit over 2 minutes off the compile of
the MacSCSI code itself.

Dave

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