dreher.net

Hi,

Not long ago received my CFFA card from Run 3 and had everything working fine. Then I was able to buy an Apple II 3.5 ("Superdrive") disk controller card on E-Bay. I have not been able to get my Apple II GS to boot from the CFFA card with the disk controller card installed. Here is the setup:

Rom 3 GS
Slot 1: Apple High Speed SCSI card
Slot 3: 8 MHz Zip GSX
Slot 5: "Superdrive" controller
Slot 7: CFFA card w 512 M Sandisk CFC

Whether the boot drive is set to "7" or "Scan" the computer attempts to boot from the CFFA card, but fails with the message "Unable to boot from ProDos". The same thing happens with "PR#7" from the Applesoft prompt. However, if I type "PR#1" the computer boots properly from a hard drive attached to the SCSI card. Everything comes up fine. I see all the partitions (4 ProDos 1 HFS) on the CFFA as well as on the hard drive. Everything works fine.

I have tried moving the Disk Controller card to slot 6, swapping the cards in slots 5 and 7. and changing the speed of the slots on the ZipGS control panel. Nothing has any effect except pulling the Superdrive controller. As soon as I do, I can again boot from the CFFA. I am sure that I once saw a report of somone who had both a CFFA and a Superdrive controller in a II GS with everthing working. Anybody have any idea what my problem might be?

Just to clarify--you note that you've tried startup with both "scan" and set to slot 7. Do you also have the slot set to "my card"? (and the same for the SuperDrive card). IIRC, while the GS/OS patch will allow the CFFA to be accessed even if "my card" isn't selected, you can't boot from it that way.

Later................Howard

Yes "Your Card" is selected for both slots.

I didn't know that you could access but not boot from the CFFA if "Your Card" was not selected. That does seem like a clue.

VegasA2,

I don't have a SuperDrive Controller so I won't be able to recreate your problem. But if this is a problem with all Superdrive controllers, I sure would like to figure out what is wrong. The problem is, when those controllers show up on Ebay there is a huge bidding war for them and I don't really want to pay that much. If I can get my hands on one, I will see what happens for me. But you may want to post your message on the comp.sys.apple2 if you have not already. That group gets a lot more traffic than my forum does these days.

I have ceased to be able to boot from the SCSI drive with the Apple II 3.5 Disk Controller card installed. Immediately after the icon for the last partition for the SCSI drive appears on the desktop the system crashes to the monitor. It looks like there is something wrong with the disk controller rather than an incompatibility between the controller and the CFFA card. I am watching e-bay for another drive controller. A NIB one just went for $200 with two "superdrives."