Woz IIgs w/ AE Vulcan 20mb HDD

[miniMOJOman]

in the partition manager program I can format and set the boot partition, but the drive never shows up on the desktop.. what am I doing wrong?

 

[waynestewart]

I don't know of any way to deal with bad blocks using the Partition Manager.

For now, can you turn off the bad partition and just use the good one?

 

[miniMOJOman]

ARG, I just found out you can press the AE keys together in Part Manager and it will scan the drive and create what is called a "VALID PARTITION BLOCK"... I ran the scan, and then it couldnt create the valid partition block... I am thinking this HDD is just dead lol.... 

 

[miniMOJOman]

Before I found the "AE" key combination, it had 2 partitions but they weren't set to "ON"... which I believe you can only set them to on, once you create a valid partition block.. this is all very new to me.. haha

 

[miniMOJOman]

GREAT, so I was running the scan yesterday at the shop, and it literally took 5 hours to scan through 300 of the 700+ cylinders.  So I left it on overnight, probably a big mistake, when I came in this morning the IIgs was off.  I think the Vulcan Power Supply crapped out overnight in the heat/power... It doesnt turn on anymore ... I dont see any bulging caps or anything in the PSU and I have no idea how to start diagnosing where the power problem is.. but I guess this baby will have to go on the backburner until I find out how to repair it sad day

 

[miniMOJOman]

So when i remove the Vulcan Hard Drive from the Power Supply, it turns on.. .does that mean the PSU is failing, or the hard drive somehow is causing a short or something?  Seems like the PSU might not be supplying enough power anymore?  So confused

 

[miniMOJOman]

LOL I just unplugged the IDE hard drive from the Vulcan power supply..The power supply turned on and powered the IIgs w/o the hard drive in it... so then I plugged it into just a bare power cord from another computer... the disk spun up fine.. so I put it back in the vulcan powersupply and it works fine now?

 

[CelGen]

What did I tell you about the flat-out-A W F U L reliability of those drives?

Just get rid of the damn drive. It's the source of all your problems right now.

 

[CC_333]

Would some kind of 1-10 GB IDE drive work?

I have a bunch I don't want or need at present.

c

 

[waynestewart]

Won't work. There's only a few drives that'll work with your card. If you changed the EPROM to the Vulcan Gold then there's more than a dozen that'll work. Any drive that'll work will be from the same era your drive was made.

The drive can be replaced with a Compact Flash but finding one that'll work is difficult. I borrowed CFs from a lot of friends obsolete cameras before I found some that would work. The nice part is that they're a lot faster than the drives. The odds of finding a compatible CF go up if you have the Vulcan Gold EPROM

 

[CelGen]

Again, give it a 32mb Compact Flash card and it's happy.

 

[miniMOJOman]

Again, give it a 32mb Compact Flash card and it's happy.

yah, the hardrive ended up smoking, so I took it out and I removed the vulcan parts for the time being.. I need to get a CF card thingy.. I dont know where to find one!!  

 

[CC_333]

I have a bunch!

I'll have to look at them, but some are 32 MB, 64 MB and maybe a couple are 128 MB.

Are there any brands/models that are known to work reliably?

c

 

[CelGen]

I used a card branded by Kodak but one with Canon or Nikon branding might also work. On paper any CF card 32mb and under will work but god knows how modern cards behave with controllers this old. It's once you go over that I can't really say as you exceed the maximum partition size for ProDOS.

 

[NJRoadfan]

The Vulcan supports multiple partitions, so 32MB isn't a hard limit. The problem is that the firmware only supports a limited amount of CHS combinations, similar to the old BIOS drive types before "User Defined" came about. I wouldn't be surprised if the table is close to or identical to them. The Vulcan ROM is completely inflexible and refuses to work if it detects something not matching its on board drive table.

http://webpages.charter.net/danrollins/techhelp/0054.HTM

http://vintage-pc.tripod.com/types.html

Here is the semi-official Vulcan drive list: http://mirrors.apple2.org.za/ground.icaen.uiowa.edu/MiscInfo/Drives/vulcan.specs

 

[miniMOJOman]

I need to get the CF card first, aren't they unavailable?!   I know I can get the actual CF card, I am speaking of the adapter for the IIgs....  here are some pictures for your enjoyment of the hoard of software/books I got with this WOZ IIgs

 

[sstaylor]

If you search ebay for something like "cf card lot" you can often come up with auctions for a dozen different cf cards of low capacity for fairly cheap.  Maybe one or two will work...

 

[CC_333]

http://www.ebay.com/itm/32MB-SanDisk-CompctFlash-CF-Card-Industrial-Grade-SDCFB-32-201-80-100-Genuine-/261574063941?hash=item3ce7077745

This one might work? The listing's for a single card, though.

c

 

[waynestewart]

These are the ones that I have that work with my controllers. The 16s and 32s work with the 40mb EPROM but the 64s only work with the Vulcan Gold EPROM.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B9r6vH-4NK4NRXpSMnlwSWh4SzA&authuser=0

 

[gdanie]

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.

I got the 4mb RAM card from gglabs and I can testify that it is awesome.  Well worth the money.