A/UX with third-party drive?

[goldfarb at hcx9.UCF.EDU]

>We have a Mac-II (5MB) with an 80MB Jasmine drive and we're thinking
>of buying an Apple cartridge tape and A/UX (and the PMMU, etc.) Can
>this be done? Or is the drive going to be a problem? How about other
>third-party drives you've seen work?

I managed to get A/UX 1.1 running on my Mac II with an 80 Mb CMS
internal drive.  It wasn't fun.  The biggest problem is that CMS doesn't
supply a formatter utility that can create the necessary SCSI partitions.
(Apparently, they eventually intend to do so, because there is a "partition"
button in their "Platinum" formatter that is always greyed out.

Fortunately, CMS uses the same Quantum Q280 drive that Apple uses as 
its 80 Meg internal.  After a little tweaking, I was able to get the
Apple HD SC Utility to format the CMS drive.  Actually, it was more than
a little tweaking; lots of frustration and steel nerves.  After ignoring
all the warnings and messages and initializing the disk on startup, I
found the appropriate partitions present.  If Jasmine uses a different
movement, you would probably have to change IDs and tables inside the
Apple Utility.  Without source code, this is a nightmare only a crusty
old hacker would enjoy!  The big question: does Jasmine have a formatter
that partitions the disk as A/UX expects?

I loaded AUX from the 40 MB tape (thanks for the loaned drive, Apple!)
and was able to boot UNIX on the first shot.  fsck came out with no
errors, so I'd say the format, etc., is valid.  I've had no problems since.
I haven't tried to use dp to repartition anything, but I don't want to
press my luck just yet!

>Also, if anyone knows of a good third-party cartridge tape which would
>work for this set-up I'd be interested in hearing about it.

Ditto!  I'd really like to see something that uses DC-600's and has a
driver for A/UX (obviously).  Let me know what kind of responses you get.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ben Goldfarb				uucp: {decvax,peora}!ucf-cs!goldfarb
University of Central Florida		Internet: goldfarb at hcx9.ucf.edu
Department of Computer Science		BITNET: goldfarb at ucf1vm.BITNET