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From: bond@chalmers.UUCP (Magnus Bondesson)
Newsgroups: net.micro.mac
Subject: MacXL - An Answer and Some Questions
Message-ID: <484@chalmers.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 28-Feb-86 22:24:05 EST
Article-I.D.: chalmers.484
Posted: Fri Feb 28 22:24:05 1986
Date-Received: Mon, 3-Mar-86 01:17:29 EST
Organization: Dept. of CS, Chalmers, Sweden
Lines: 42

We have several MacXLs. We are fairly satisfied with them but have experienced
some difficulties.

1. Thrashed harddisk: A solution.
Occasionally any of the XLs break down in the following way. When the XL is
started or reset the Finder isn't able to create the desktop but hangs itself
in the process. It doesn't help to "repair" the disk in the standard way.
One solution is of course to reformat the disk, but then you loose the files.
Our solution is to start the XL with a 3.5" systemdisk having MacTools as its
StartUp-program. At all occasions it has turned out that there is a file with
a bad name and you just have to remove it. Quitting MacTools you always get a
Bomb, which is a promising sign, since everything works fine after that.

The problem has occured about 20 times in the last 6 month period. Since we
have 11 machines this means twice for each machine. Although our solution is
simple it takes some time and hence the situation is quite annoying. To make 
things clear I should say that we have MacWorks 3.0 on most of the machines
(cf below) and that it occurs on all machines.
I assume that the problem has occured elsewhere (in fact similar problems have
been reported recently over the net). Maybe there is a better solution.  The
best would of course be if Apple could fix the Bug permanently.

2. MacWorks 3.0 and Lisas
Some of our XLs are in fact Lisas with an external 10 Mb hard disk. When we
bought the machines last summer they all were said to be compatible. However
the Lisas won't accept the MacWorks3.0-disk although they accepted the Prelease-
disk. Why?

3. HFS on MacXL
I eagerly ask Apple to produce a working HFS for the XLs. Since we use the XLs
and equally many usual Macs (which we intend to upgrade to MacPlus) in our
programming education, we anticipate great problems if we don't have compatible
systems. For the same reason it would be interesting to know if it is possible
to upgrade the XLs disk drives from 400K to 800K.


Magnus Bondesson
Dep of Computer Sciences
Chalmers University of Technology
S-412 96 Goteborg
Sweden
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