Hey, I am relatively new to the IIgs, and in my enthusiasm to get it up to the level of an Amiga 2000, I decided to buy a SCSI card, and ideally install GSOS to a hard disk and boot from it.This seems to be, possibly a faster method than booting from a smart port disk?
So to do this I bought an A2SCSI card from GGLabs a couple of years back, and only now am I installing it, as I also have an Apple Squeezer card.
So, the rub... Having installed a working GSOS 6.0.4 installation to a Smartport disk using an emulator and a FloppyEMU, I can get my IIgs to boot to GSOS 6.0.4 all good.Along the way the OS complains that it cant load in the hard disk, because this requires drivers... which is kind of expected.The GGLabs site, provides a disk image of those drives, and I have installed these into the 6.0.4 install, using its supplied install, but sadly after a reeboot, the issue persists.
I have used another disk that GGLabs provided, a SCSI Utlity that can check the Hard Disks, and partition them as well, but this only works AFAIK when booted as a floppyThe same utils do not appear to work when your IN GSOS, which is a little frustrating (but this was the 80s after all... :) )The good news is, it saw all 5 SCSI drive images I had put on a BlueSCSI and reported them all at their correct sizes, 32mb each, and one at 256mb as an experiment.And I can also choose one of the 32mb drives, and partition it, though oddly the Util only seems to allow me to add two partitions of 10mb each.....
So, now I find myself in two worlds. GSOS WITH the correct drivers installed, refuses to see the BlueSCSI's Drives, even when partitioned.But, if I boot from the SCSI Utilities disk (floppy) I CAN see them.
Does anyone know what the magic sauce is here?Is it an issue with GSOS 6.0.4? I assume not as it was recommended because it fixes various bugs, so I assume it is MORE compatible with hard drives etc, not less.Did I install the drivers incorrectly in some way?
And the original manual for the original SCSI card that this card is based on, is VERY technical, but never goes into the nitty gritty of how to install it on a IIgs for example.There appears to be a missing link. Youd assume there would be an official install Floppy disk set for this card, but...Any help appreciated, its not a hardware issue here, its software (or me)
Good luck with your software issue, I was hoping it was a hardware one. I had two of these cards I sorted by changing all the non LS logic to LS series. It had a bunch of HCT, ACT, and other logic families mixed that caused me issue. It caused far more issue in IIE than IIGS, they usually worked in IIGS even with mismatched logic families. Anyway again good luck and I hope you get it sorted!
Hey, thanks for the feedback. So, you had hardware issues, that you said you solved in the end. So, the question begs, what did you do with the card once it WAS working? Did you use it with a IIe or a IIgs or?
BTW, here are the resources for this card
The GGLabs product page
https://gglabs.us/node/2326
The Apple II SCSI card, upon which the GGLabs card is based (it was an attempted clone, but they HAD to change some things due to parts not being available any more...)
https://gglabs.us/sites/gglabs.us/files/Apple%20II%20SCSI%20TRM.pdf
https://www.applefritter.com/content/gglabs-a2scsi
Hey, thanks for the link, Ill check it out...
An update on the issue, and yes, its certainly VOODOO
I found 3x .hda images on the BlueSCSI site, one is a basic install of GSOS 6.0.1, one is a complete install and the 3rd is a custom install of 6.0.4. So... to confuse things, whoever made these images made them as 100mb files. So they are apparently partitioned into 3 ProDos disks, Blue1, 2 and 3. So I copied the 6.0.4 image to be BlueSCSI as ID 6 and gave it a go....
And it booted!But... this is where it gets weirder. During the boot, it complained the device it was booting from could not be used, because of.... yes, those pesky drivers.... And yet it completed booting and on the GSOS desktop there was only one drive, Blue1. Blue2 and 3 were nowhere to be found. Very odd.
So as it was 6.0.4, it has the Advanced Disk Tools util, and I loaded it, and its started by pointing at Blue1, the boot disk. It complained that it could not do anything with this disk, because of a lack of drivers. Gah! But of course it complains about this even when I specifically INSTALLED the drivers and reboote.
This, of course is not satisfactory. Why?
1. How can I make images such as these? I cant even SEE the hard disk to install the OS to when I boot from a Floppy Emu (maybe they conflict in some way). But I guess not, its more to do with this missing (not missing) drive issue. Is there an emulator that can mount .hda files?2. I want to SHOW people how to do this, but I cannot even do it myself, because of the heavy dose of VOODOO chilly here3. Although this works, it does not, in some major ways, for example the boot disk cannot be seen by its own HD utils
4. Where are the other two partitions?
Anyway, forget partitions, what about other drives? I renamed the 6.0.4 HDA to 50, and copied the 6.0.1 basic install onto the BlueSCSI card, so now I have TWO drives on it, 6.0.1 being the boot. I flipped the switch, it booted and.... Only the first Blue1 disk appeared, I GUESS because both images have a Blue1 drive, and ONLY one drive with the same name can be shown.
So yeah, some movement forward. But still not a clear path to getting where I want to be i.e. setting it up from scratch myself, having multiple partitions appear as 32mb disks, and NOT having the driver issue.
I have a IIgs with a FloppyEmu and have been looking, much like you, into the A2SCSI card and an external BlueSCSI to speed up boot times. I'm new-ish to this world, and really new to SCSI in general. In fact, I created a new AF account just to make a suggestion here and ask a question.
Just a crazy thought. Are you able to run the GSOS installation tool and maybe add the SCSI tools that are included in the OS itself, then install the GGLabs version over top? I'm wondering if they overwrite the drivers but leave some supporting OS-level software in place? I vaguely remember manually selecting SCSI tools and drivers when I installed GSOS 6.0.4 from floppy onto my FloppyEMU virtual SmartPort hard drive.
Second question, and a little self-serving. I see that this card has a pin header for SCSI. Does it come with a cable to convert that pin header into an external connector that pops through the back of the IIgs for external SCSI peripherals like a ZIP drive or CDROM? Or is it internal-only SCSI? I can't find an answer in any of the GGLabs documentation.
Yeah, I too like SCSI, mainly because its closer to the REAL hardware used back in the day. It CAN make you jump through some hoops though, but it does open doors to using REAL drive enclosures and such, but with BlueSCSI/ZuluSCSI as replacements for the real drives, as they are all dying off at this point, being 30+ years old. SCSI IDs takes a little getting used to, but once you have learnt how to use, it opens the use of Blue/ZuluSCSI devices on ANY platform that used SCSI back then, of which there were quite a few...
Yes I did try that, but no beans for my problem unfortunately. It appears (even) the patched DRIVERS (GGLabs) cannot SEE my a drive for some reason. Its very odd. Others with the same card, do not have this issue...]
There is a PIN header, and it comes with a short cable going from it to a real DB25 external port. So its great in that regard. Ideally, the card would ALSO have an internal 50 pin connector, to allow for internal drives as well. But it does not, as its an almost 100% clone of the original card, which did not have an internal connector either. This means you can ONLY use this card with an external BlueSCSI model, I think there is also an external ZuluSCSI you can use too. You CAN use an internal device as well, but this requires the user of an adapter, a gender changed and a 50 pin cable, which is... fun :)
BTW, I dont think GGLabs make these cards any more. Maybe they have or will release its code/gerber for others to make?