Woz IIgs w/ AE Vulcan 20mb HDD

[miniMOJOman]

So I have been having a really hard time getting this IIgs to fully work properly.   It has the Vulcan 20mb Hard drive installed with upgraded power supply and Applied Engineering IDE card.  When I first got it the HDD was stuck and wouldnt even post.  After I removed the hard drive and lightly tapped it, it began trying to boot off of the hard drive into GS/OS.  When it would reach the end of the loading screen it would have an error, so I just kind of assumed that the data had been damaged and GS/OS should be reinstalled.  Well everytime I try to use a GS/OS boot disk just to boot to a desktop, it can never load and tells me not enough ram to load GS/OS... which I dont understand because it was already installed previously on this computer and had been given to me that way... so how did they get GS/OS.... oooohh I just had a thought as I was typing this... I remember reading that the vulcan came with GS/OS 4.0 instead of 6.0  maybe that is why it worked previously.... should I try to get some GS/OS 4.0 install disks????

Also I ordered 24 chips to add to the IIgs memory expansion, so that should give me enough ram for 6.0.. but in the meantime I want to get this fully working!! Any thoughts/ideas/etc??

Thanks!

 

[Elfen]

(Scratching my head on this one...)

I thought GSOS could only boot on a ROM 3 machine with 2MB of RAM. I do need to read up on this as I do have a Woz IIgs and wonder what I can do with it.

 

[miniMOJOman]

(Scratching my head on this one...)

I thought GSOS could only boot on a ROM 3 machine with 2MB of RAM. I do need to read up on this as I do have a Woz IIgs and wonder what I can do with it.

From what I am reading GS/OS system 4 needs 512kb ram.  System 6 at least 1mb.  I remember reading on the Vulcan manual that the Hard Drive came preloaded with system 4.. So that makes sense why it WAS working before I deleted the partition.  Either way, it wouldnt boot into it... the hard drive might be totally bad.. I dont know yet because I cant get an installer to run... I just tried a GS/OS System 4 disk that I downloaded but it didnt create the disk properly, so I am going to try another download.  I'll keep it updated!

 

[miniMOJOman]

OH and GS/OS can be installed on Rom1 or Rom3, just not Rom 0... 

 

[Elfen]

Thanks for the info.

Now... A Woz IIgs as I remember is  modified ROM 0. Modified how, I do not know.

 

[miniMOJOman]

Interesting, well it still says Rom 1 on the bottom of the screen on mine, so I have no idea!

 

[Elfen]

Interesting, well it still says Rom 1 on the bottom of the screen on mine, so I have no idea!

HA! Who knows, one of us must have had  logic board swap.

 

[CelGen]

I have the same Vulcan setup and I know it will run system 6 mind you, my machine came with 4mb of ram. Unless they switched brands at one point, you probably have one of these nightmares like I do.

If a format fails or it repeatedly gives you trouble, Junk the drive.

You can reuse the IDE card with a Compact Flash adapter but you're up against the 40mb ProDOS filesystem limit. It doesn't play nice with overly large cards but an old 32mb card formatted and ran beautifully in my machine.

 

[miniMOJOman]

CelGen:

I DO have the same WD drive that is pictured on the link you gave me!  The problem I have is that when I try to start the installer for System 4/6 I always get an error $00027 which, I read, is a RAM error.  I ordered more chips that should be here tomorrow to fully populate the Ram Expansion Card.  Then I will try to install...

How do you try to reformat the drive? What utility do you use?? I am not familiar with the IIgs and dont know the software... I try to make disks with my Beige G3 and Bernie ][ the Rescue, but its hit or miss.

Also, do you have the original software/disks that came with the vulcan? I would appreciate some disk images, even though I think they are on the Macgarden, I am not sure if they are the correct ones.

 

[NJRoadfan]

http://ae.applearchives.com/all_apple_iis/vulcan/

Also, I wouldn't even bother with the Apple RAM card. ggLabs sells a 4MB card on ebay, no worries about running out of memory with one of these. If you need to get a disk image to the IIgs, use ADTPro (or the FloppyEmu if you have one). Power Mac manual inject floppy drives aren't all that reliable at making 800k disks.

The Vulcan controller is notoriously picky about what type of drive is connected to it. Very few CF cards will actually work with it.

 

[miniMOJOman]

I just received the chips to fully populate my 1mb Ram Expansion.  Every time I try to istall GS/OS onto the HDD it has an I/O Error about 1/3 of the way through.  IS there a utility/program that I can reformat the drive and possibly skip these bad sectors?  Or do I just need to replace the drive with a new one or CFFA?  I DO want the CFFA just funds are tight!

 

[miniMOJOman]

Or is there a way, now that I am booted into OS 6.0.1 from a Boot Disk, can I just copy over the system contents to the HDD instead of installing it?

 

[CelGen]

IS there a utility/program that I can reformat the drive and possibly skip these bad sectors?

Check the link above for the utility disks for the Vulcan. It includes a formatting utility and badblock tool if I recall. My drive was bootable AS-IS when I bought the machine at Value Village and continued to be useable after I formatted it once or twice for good measure.

I really do not recommend investing in a CFFA if you have the Vulcan controller. Again, all you need is a 32mb CF card and you're

golden. I don't knwo why the heck people moan about the card being slow. A mass storage controller is a mass storage controller.

 

[miniMOJOman]

Celgen:

 I downloaded the zip from the link but it is using the newer .bxy file and I guess I need to use Shrinkit, which I am not familiar with to unpack it to make a disk image.....  I'll keep plugging along!! ill let you know the progress, I really appreciate the help

 

[NJRoadfan]

In the zip, there is a file called "Vulcan ProDOS.po", this is a bootable 5.25" disk image with the Vulcan partitioning and format program. If you have a Windows machine, CIderpress can extract the BXY and SHK files, use it to throw everything onto a 800k disk image. The files included are the GS/OS device driver and a CDA.

 

[miniMOJOman]

In the zip, there is a file called "Vulcan ProDOS.po", this is a bootable 5.25" disk image with the Vulcan partitioning and format program. If you have a Windows machine, CIderpress can extract the BXY and SHK files, use it to throw everything onto a 800k disk image. The files included are the GS/OS device driver and a CDA.

Excellent!  I have been using a IIgs emulator on my G3 to create disks but its not very reliable, and I have had no way of using the 5.25" disk images.  So after I use Ciderpress to extract the files I'd put them on a flash drive and put them on the g3.  From there I would format a floppy for prodos and just drag and drop the extracted files onto the disk?? Is that the easiest way?

 

[miniMOJOman]

BTW are these "Partitioning and Formatting" programs on the 5.25" disk different from the ones on the 3.5"?  The one I was able to use was called Part Manager I believe.. (Partition Manager) it allowed me to "format" a partition, create all the partions, name them, set them to prodos/pacal/dos/etc, and select which partition was boot...  If so, I used this program to create two partitions one for 13mb, and one for 7mb, (or around) and while trying to format the second partition it said it couldnt read from block 2.   

 

[CelGen]

I don't see why the would be at all different.

 

[miniMOJOman]

Yeah, I thought there was a program to deal with bad blocks...?