Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!amdahl!bungia!orbit!pnet51!shawn
From: shawn@pnet51.cts.com (Shawn Stanley)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple
Subject: Re: GS/OS and the Sider: HELP!
Message-ID: <148@orbit.UUCP>
Date: 5 Oct 88 15:25:37 GMT
Sender: root@orbit.UUCP
Organization: People-Net [pnet51], Minneapolis, MN.
Lines: 52

tribby@hpindda.HP.COM (David Tribby) writes:
>Priority 1 (El Camino in Sunnyvale) had GS/OS on their demo system, and the
>salesman was very helpful. He suggested running BASIC to get GS/OS to
>recognize the Sider; I tried that when I got home (booted up from 3.5"
>floppy into the Finder & Sider volumes are not listed; run BASIC; say BYE;
>when Finder restarts, /HARD1 and /HARD2 are available!). As far as turning

Thank you VERY much for passing that information along.  I'm going to have
to try that.  I just received GS/OS yesterday, and I spent many hours last
night trying to get it to recognize my hard drive.  It was hell.  Basically,
my evening went like this:

I booted up GS/OS.  Very impressive!  I like the startup status bar it gives
you as it loads things.  However, as I didn't want to make any changes to my
master disk (which turned out to be a wise precaution), it took a lot of extra
time finishing up the boot process.  It probably tried to work out the font
list file and did some sort of error checking that it gave up on.

The desktop came up.  I noticed there was no Apple 20 meg hard drive anywhere
on it.  "Oh great."  So I put the /SYSTEM.TOOLS disk in the other 3.5" drive
and checked that out.  It had an option for installing a SCSI Hard Drive
driver!  Looked good to me.  So I made a copy of my /SYSTEM.DISK, ran the
Installer on it to place the SCSI driver in the /SYSTEM.DISK/SYSTEM/DRIVERS
subdirectory, and booted it.

I had several problems.  I made several attempts.  At one time I noticed that
although it started up fine, it still wouldn't show the hard drive icon.  But
that seemed to be the least of my problems.  I discovered that one of my 3.5"
drives seemed to be very unreliable in reading/writing disks, although I never
got any initialization/copy errors from the new Finder.  On booting up the
hard drive (with SYSTEM.DISK 3.1) I was able to attempt the copy, but got
blocked by the fact that the Finder on that version would recognize an
initialization error and instead of reporting it, ejected the disk and made
the icon for that drive dim.  Problems at every turn...

I even tried copying the entire SYSTEM.DISK to an 800k /RAM volume at one
point.  That was interesting.  I installed the SCSI driver on that and booted
from it, and it finished the initialization before the status bar was fully
red.  That was amusing... booting up from /RAM is very quick indeed.  However,
the hard drive icon still refused to appear.

My personal guess is that it's some sort of chicken-and-egg problem.  You
can't access the hard drive unless you've accessed the hard drive.  I wonder
what would happen if the SCSI card was in a lower port... not that I have any
lower slots free to attempt it.

I will try your BASIC solution.  It seems reasonable enough to work.
Incidently, did you need the SCSI driver installed on your system disk
for it to work, or did it work without it?

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