Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!mailrus!ames!ncar!boulder!sunybcs!bingvaxu!leah!itsgw!brspyr1!tim
From: tim@brspyr1.BRS.Com (Tim Northrup)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: RAM disk and Magic Sac (Really: Sac & HD20)
Message-ID: <3526@brspyr1.BRS.Com>
Date: 16 May 88 14:31:54 GMT
References: <930@elmgate.UUCP>
Organization: BRS Information Technologies, Latham NY
Lines: 60

From article <930@elmgate.UUCP>, by jdg@elmgate.UUCP (Jeff Gortatowsky):
| 
| 	The magic sac is interesting... HOWEVER! Anybody seriously thinking
| of using it, MUST! have a harddisk. Even w/ 2 DS floppy's The disk swaps
| will drive ya nuts! This is no fault of the magic sac... Just the way
| they grew the apple. I went through CONTORTIONS! getting the system 3.2/
| FINDER 5.4 and Harddisk20 (the Hard disk driver for 64k mac roms (you know
| the ones w/ the little gray hairs on em')) I thought great here we go!
| My hard disk is STILL not working w/ it just blows up every time I tell
| it there's a hard disk there!). Why? Got me? Anyone out there?
| I've tried every combo I can think of, it just gets an illegal instruction
| trap EVERYTIME! (too much gravity from the moon maybe? (hmmm...)).

I just went through the same thing.  What I did was went back and went through
the steps outlined in the notes for Release 5.9 (you are using this release,
aren't you???).  You must follow the rules EXACTLY -- TO THE LETTER.

In my first attempt, I formatted an MFS and an HFS partition as instructed.
Then booted with HD enabled from a floppy w/o HD20.  I then copied the
System Folder from the boot floppy to the MFS, then HD20 from another
floppy to the MFS partition.   *** BAD MOVE ***  It seems that copying
the file "System" from the boot floppy tries to make the MFS partition
bootable, which really messes it up.  As far as I can tell, everything
for the system folder MUST be copied from another disk (not the one used
to boot in Mac mode).

Be sure to use Finder 5.3 --- Using Finder 5.4 on the MFS partition
really causes some wierdness.  You must use 5.3 on the MFS boot partition,
but you can put 5.4 on the HFS partition, which is the one that will
eventually be used anyway.

I still get crashes every now and then, but the above findings eliminated
a lot of them.

If anyone finds anything more, please post or email to me!

[ Has anyone read the notes from Data Pacific on GEnie regarding use of
	the harddisk?  I haven't looked there yet, but I remember reading
	somewhere that there was something there. ]

> Conclusions? Errr... W/ a WORKING harddisk, the $99 magic Sac is a fine buy.
> And actually an incredable feat for Dave Small. There's just nothing like
> seeing that little McFace staring at ya!. My compliments to Dave.

Actually, I found it pretty good even with floppy disks.  I have 1 meg
of memory (I would not recommend less), and use RamDisk+ to create a
350K RAM Disk -- then copy whatever I want to run that session there.  It
also allows for copying of the System/Finder stuff and running from there,
but you need HFS installed for that (which leaves out floppy-only systems :-(

Anything that needs the 128K ROMs *will not work*.  This includes neat things
like HyperCard, which I think is one of the things Magic Hackers really
want.  But there is still a lot of good stuff that does work.

> Jeff Gortatowsky        .....allegra!rochester!kodak!elmgate!jdg
-- 
Tim "The Enchanter" Northrup      +------------------------------------------+
+---------------------------------+ Air Warrior Handle:			     |
UUCP: uunet!steinmetz!brspyr1!tim |  		"Duke"			     |
ARPA: tim@brspyr1.BRS.Com	  +------------------------------------------+