From: jnomina@bgsu.edu (Aqualung)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple2
Subject: Re: RamFast settings...
Date: 9 Apr 92 01:10:06 GMT
Organization: Bowling Green State University B.G., Oh.



"...I'm back in the saddle again...."
[Finally allowed to use that line from Steven Tyler!]

I finally got hold of CV Technologies, things are
straightened out, and here's a report of what happened,
what can happen, and what to do...compliments of the
guy from CV I pumped for information today.  Wish I could
remember his name and give credit where credit is due.  But
alas, we had more important business to discuss than such
social trivialities at the time...

What happened...
     I formatted the HDD when I panicked and couldn't get
     anything going.  Well, I'm sure that this wasn't all of
     it, in and of itself.  Maybe it was merely that I'd
     partitioned it.  But, one of those two things caused the
     system to not be happy and start acting up.  My original
     first problem was that Archiver was removing 10megs of
     HDD space after I partitioned.  After that, perhaps it was
     the low-level format which caused the error to occur,
     causing the HDD to not boot at all.

What to do...
     Do a high level format.  That's what he called it.  Use the
     "initialize" option from the Disk menu.  Actually, it seems
     to me that this only erases any directory structure which
     is on the disk, not that it actually "initializes" or "high-
     level formats" anything.  Possible misnomer?  Explanation,
     anyone?  (Preferably the authors who are in a position to
     know?)  Anyway, this seems to purge any and all errors that
     are cropping up, resetting everything to an operable state.
     Just high-level format all partitions on the desktop, and
     everything should be back to normal.  Then re-install your
     backup (what backup?!?!   :-}  )

A couple of points of interest...

     1.  In spite of all the hooplah about the "priority allocation"
          choices (setting them to 0), this means absolutely nothing,
          unless you're running more that _2_ partitions on the HDD.
          If only 2 partitions, they map to drives 1 and 2 of slot 7,
          and they don't disrupt anything else on the disk.  I'm sure
          that its required to have them set to 6, 2, 4 or whatever is
          going to be the Prodos 2.x allocation, so that there isn't
          a conflict of interest somewhere, especially if using 5.25"
          drives, 3.5" drives, and especially if the 0 option isn't
          available as it isn't to me...  According to the guy at
          CV, this shouldn't matter at all if using only 2 partitions...

     2.  CV is about to ship version 3 of their ROMs, as of Friday
          next week.  If anyone wants one, it will cost $15 to upgrade
          from a version 2 ROM, and $30 to upgrade from a version 1
          ROM.  Does this make sense?  Yes, according to the CV guy.
          It keeps those who upgraded to version 2 ROMs from vers. 1
          from feeling cheated for having upgraded.  This way, all people
          who had to upgrade from version 1 will have paid the same
          amount to get to version 3.  In a way, it makes sense to me,
          but hey, "don't kill the messager because of the message",
          huh?  I'm going to drive down next Friday, the day of release
          of the ROMs, and pick mine up in person.  Send money and a
          letter to them...

     3.  Technically, I should only be running GSOS 5.04 right now...
          However, after getting things going and re-installing
          everything on my HDD, GSOS 6.0 was sitting on the HDD.  I
          booted and it ran.  I've had not one error...yet...knock wood.
          Of course, I only ran through a brief list of programs,
          launching them and returning from them to see if I'd crash.
          I'd hardly call this a "thorough" testing procedure.  But
          as things look right now, System 6 and old ROM RamFASTs
          will work okay under certian conditions.

Thanks to everyone who e-mailed me with suggestions, tests,
thoughts, and whatever else was thrown to me while trying to
get things back up!  None of us thought to try a "high-level"
format, but oh well, we did what we could!

And, now that I'm up and running again, this is a little easier
to say...

Apple ][gs Forever!     ;-)

Jim