Best Hard Drive option for IIgs

[Jinnai]

Wow, that's something of a necropost, I didn't realize this was originally my thread til now.

I'm surprised at my self for never following up. I bought that ReActive Micro card, and am very happy with it. So from what I hear the CFFA is available and a good solution, but if you can find a ReActive Micro, it's definitely a pleasant card to use.

By the way, I run the latest fan-made GS/OS and have no issues, it's quite nice. And its incredibly easy to install in combination with the CF card adapter - direct copy from my PC, with a stop through CiderPress. The only issue I have is playing some games, but that may be because I'm running ROM03.

The other problem I have is I cannot run FDD games from HDD so if anyone knows of an archive of HDD games I can copy over let me know - I found a very large file of some sort of cracks for some games, but not the games themselves, and I don't need cracked games, ones intended to be installed on HDD is fine.

 

[cruff]

I know you have the ReActive Micro card, so this will not be helpful, but the CFFA lets you use FDD images directly mapped as virtual FD drives.

 

[Skate323k137]

I use my ReactiveMicro with floppy games in a couple ways. 

One is to have an extra partition or 2 of 800k each and image the disk(s) to those. This works sometimes but not every title falls for it.

Failing that I image the floppy to the iigs own Ram Disk. That works for some protected games.

Failing all that I run from a floppy or floppyemu and deal with the slowness. 

 

[Jinnai]

Thanks skate and cruff, useful info. Since I have the ReActive I'll give the ram disk a shot.

 

[dr.zeissler]

Hi there, I got my reactive-micro card some time ago and now I will get more into the IIgs.
I have to admit, that I am a beginner. Please correct me if I am wrong on these:

- The reactive microcard has two CF slots. One CF card can have up to 4 partitions 32MB max each.
- Can I make use/acess 8 partitions at once? I thought only 4 are "mountable" at once
- The manual of the card tells me how to backup the CF with ciderpress and to save the microdrive.setup which containts the configuration to a floppydisk. I have done both.
- so how do I setup a base-system on a fresh and clean CFcard? What files are essential to make it be bootable to the same menu the original card has? (on dos something like "format /s")
- What I really need is a bootable harddrive with the option to bitsy-boot to boot the floppys.
- I would also love to make my own partitions. I can make a ciderpress ".po" image and copy files from different *.hdv" images to it.
- How do I get my Image to the CF-Card ? Does ciderpress offer this ? or do I have to use something like "ADTpro" to copy via cable?
- First I have to "prepare" a fresh cf-card...

Doc

 

[cathrynmataga]

You absolutely can use 8 partitions at once with Drive Turbo. 8 partitions at 32MB is a lot for IIGS though. I'm honest not sure how to create a drive from scratch. I think that software they said to backup will do it, but what I did was I used "HDD Raw Copy" on Windows to backup the CF that came with the unity, and then restore that to a second Compact Flash drive. I boot to IIGS and then rename all the volumes and delete the stuff I don't want second copies of. This CF card can boot, and it can also load as drives 5-8. I also have a backup now, so if I bork my GS.OS install, I can restore it.

I can take the CF card I made, and then examine files on it from CiderPress. I see all the files listed on there. Lately, mostly I've been installing stuff from Fujinet, which can mount hard drives also, so I haven't used CiderPress a lot, but I think it should work.

 

[dr.zeissler]

You absolutely can use 8 partitions at once with Drive Turbo. 8 partitions at 32MB is a lot for IIGS though. I'm honest not sure how to create a drive from scratch. I think that software they said to backup will do it, but what I did was I used "HDD Raw Copy" on Windows to backup the CF that came with the unity, and then restore that to a second Compact Flash drive. I boot to IIGS and then rename all the volumes and delete the stuff I don't want second copies of. This CF card can boot, and it can also load as drives 5-8. I also have a backup now, so if I bork my GS.OS install, I can restore it.

I can take the CF card I made, and then examine files on it from CiderPress. I see all the files listed on there. Lately, mostly I've been installing stuff from Fujinet, which can mount hard drives also, so I haven't used CiderPress a lot, but I think it should work.

I ended up using the stock CF Card with it's 32MB Partition and a big 2GB CF Card with eine partition. The problem is, that the 2GB Partition is not very useful. copied games with e.g. "path mods" always tend to access the floppy drive even if started from that 2GB partition. I am not really satisfied with that solution.

 

[nathall]

Anyone know how to make one of these recognize there are two CFs installed on one card and mount both successfully?

I have two of these cards and each one has one CF attached. Both CFs mount to the desktop (all 8 partitions) as long as I have both MicroDrive cards installed and enabled in the Slots control panel.

If I try to install both CFs on one card (either one, it doesn’t matter), it just ignores the second CF and only mounts the ”front” one. I’d really like to free up a slot in my machine, but I haven’t been able to figure out how to make this work. The fact that both my MicroDrive cards behave the same way makes me think I’m just missing something here.

 

[dr.zeissler]

There is a utility on the disk that lets you choose how to setup the partitions and cards. I am not sure how you did the setup. Please make a screenshot.

 

[nathall]

I don’t believe I did any setup. I had bought a brand new card w/ CF and I acquired another card w/ CF (both with factory images) that was included with something else I obtained and just tried to combine the two CFs on to one card.

I’ll post a screenshot this weekend at some point of the setup program. I remember running it at one point to see if I could make things work and nothing jumped out at me as relevant to my situation. Beyond that I never messed with it.