Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watnot!watmath!clyde!rutgers!sri-spam!ames!ucbcad!ucbvax!YALE.ARPA!fischer-michael From: fischer-michael@YALE.ARPA.UUCP Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st Subject: Re: Two questions on ST add-{o|i}ns Message-ID: <8703111519.AA03527@yale-eli.YALE.ARPA> Date: Wed, 11-Mar-87 10:19:14 EST Article-I.D.: yale-eli.8703111519.AA03527 Posted: Wed Mar 11 10:19:14 1987 Date-Received: Fri, 13-Mar-87 00:17:18 EST References: Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Distribution: world Organization: The ARPA Internet Lines: 51 In-reply-to: imagen!atari!leavens@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (Alex Leavens) > in article <7988@akguc.UUCP>, rbk@akguc.UUCP (R. Brad Kummer) says: > > > > BTW, when ARE we going to see the updated hard disk driver (or whatever) > > from Atari that allows booting from the hard disk??? > > > If we were working on such a thing, I'm sure we'd be trying very hard > to get it out the door. I want to thank Alex for becoming active on the net and responding to people's questions. However, I was a little disappointed at his uninformative answer above. Perhaps he is unaware of the history surrounding this issue. Late last summer, someone at Atari said that such a program was already finished, was being used in-house at Atari, and would be released shortly after it had been tested thoroughly. It never was. A couple of months ago, Allan Pratt explained on the net that when he boots his machine, he simply inserts a blank floppy and the machine boots automatically from the hard disk. So apparently the program is still being used in-house at Atari. We were also told that the reason it had not been released to the world was because it can be tricky to recover from a bad boot sector or bad programs in the C:\AUTO folder on the hard disk, for if the machine crashes during booting, how can you delete the offending files? Atari wanted to be sure that people who encountered this problem would have a way out other than calling Atari and asking for help. (Reasonable enough!) It seemed to me that an easy way to recover would be to have a floppy with a valid boot sector, such as the original TOS-in-RAM system disk. Booting from this disk would bypass the hard disk boot, allowing the machine to come up normally without running the programs on the hard disk. One could then install the hard disk driver and go in and repair the C:\AUTO folder or rebuild the boot sector or whatever. If that indeed is the best strategy for recovery, then it would be reaonable for Atari to make sure that anyone using the program also had access to the recovery procedures by only distributing the program with such a disk and not posting it to the net. But that has apparently not been done, either. That's the last we've heard. We know the program exists and has been in daily use at Atari for over six months. We just want to know when we can have it. --Mike Fischer -------