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CMS SCSI II card with 3-1-90 ROM - $150; is this good? Bad? How's the card?

Strange thing is I only saw two from GS-OS Why did it take 40+ minutes to format and partition the other 30 if it only uses 2?
A SCSI disk drive normally formats the entire disk in response to the format command. I don't remember if I saw any drives support partial reformatting.
 
The whole idea behind SCSI mass storage is that it's as hardware-independent as possible. So no CHS addressing--it's always been logical block. Some drives don't even have extensions of the REQUEST_SENSE command that will tell you the geometry of the drive. So, 04, FORMAT_UNIT is an all-or-nothing affair. For many drives, it's either rejected or does nothing, as SCSI drives come factory-formatted.
 
So I decided to actually use this CMS scsi card. I installed an actual Seagate 33gb Ultra wide Cheetah 15K drive in an external enclosure I picked up for $5.00 at the last swapmeet. The CMS card saw the drive no problem. I was trying to use the bluescsi I had since I dont really have a use for it but the CMS card couldnt even see the bluescsi so I opted for real hardware.

A couple years back I used ADTpro to backup some partitions from my fully loaded IIgs with Booti Card. It took an hour for each 32Mb Prodos partition to transfer over. I did the same thing in reverse and transferred two of the backed up drives over to the cheetah drive. Unfortunately I had that original IIgs setup with 4 hard drives, 3 X 32MB prodos and 1 512MB HFS drive. One system, one games, one programs, and one storage. I will have to find a way to copy the games folder from something else onto the programs drive since I am now only limited to two 32MB partitions (talk about a waste of a 32GB drive!). What I am most curious about is can I use the cheetah drive with an external SCSI CDrom drive on the iigs. If so, this card isnt all that bad.
 
@magnusfalkirk provided a bunch of SCSI disk images. Apparently they are only made to work with the Apple branded (or maybe clones of ) scsi cards. Mine is definitely not an Apple branded one. I went through ever single disk image and they pretty much all say "apple scsi card not found".



Here is a screenshot of the onboard scsi utility built into the SCSI cards rom. You can see the hard drive shows up as SCSI ID #0 and the CDROM is ID #4

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IMG_20221122_094820.jpg

I do have the utility disk for this card and I was reading the PDF manual (which also tells me the correct jumpers which are set already) and on the section for IIGs it does list CDroms and zip drives so that implies it works with them. There was a driver file it said to add to GS-OS system/drivers folder which I did. I had more access to partitions and it changed the icons so I know the driver worked. Still no cdrom though.

This computer has a scsi harddrive with GS-OS 6.0.4 it boots to. I have a known working External Apple 300 CDrom drive I am trying to use but I also have a couple 3rd party external scsi cdroms as well. I loaded the Media Control panel and here is a photo.

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No scsi listed under ports



From what I have seen online I should see a SCSI entry under "select a port" Its not there. What have I missed? Is there a walktrhough I can use for setting up a CDrom correctly on GS-OS?
Well there isnt alot out there documenting the process and I found this video on youtube. As you can see he has a SCSI entry under "ports" I do not.
 
Something else important to note: We all thought the CMS card kind of stinks because it can only address any two 32MB prodos partitions at one time, but that turns out to not be entirely true. With the CMS GS-OS driver file I mentioned in my previous post enabled, you have access to ALL partitions under GS-OS at once! So now I am booting GS-OS and I have to sit through 68 notifications (there are sixty-seven 32MB partitions and one slightly less) of an un-initialized 32MB volule, Should I eject or Initialize! Yikes. I thought there as a GS-OS limit as to how many prodos drives the system can handle at once. Wasnt it 8 or 16 total? I gave up at 9.

What If I swap out my CMS scsi card for my Apple FAST SCSI card or my brand new GGLABS A2SCSI card and keep the first 3 or 4 32MB prodos partitions but convert the remainder of the drive into 4GB HFS (thats the max IIgs can see right?) partitions so I only have a few drives. Think that will work? Then put the CMS card back in and use the drive without so many partitions
 
If I remember correctly, the Apple and CMS ROMs/drivers use an incompatible partitioning scheme. Perhaps someone else with better memory can chime in. I only have a CMS card, but took it out after getting my CFA3000.
 
Well From what I learned online it seems the issue is the driver file. The ONLY widely supported driver under GS-OS is for the AppleCD SC Apples first HUGE caddy driven 1x model. And thats why they go for big money.

Its a shame, I know alot of people use emulators now in replacement of real hardware but lots of us still have plenty of the real things. I have at least 8 or 10 Apple CD 300 drives in both external and internal models that still work fine. They are super easy to find. Why has noone made a driver file for them or maybe a generic SCSI cd driver? I am no programmer but I know there is so much new software coming out, even GS-OS 6.0.4 is new, why hasnt there been updated CDrom support?

So with that said I am going to format the hard drive, reload GS-OS without the CMS driver so it reverts to only 2 drives working at once and go back to being allowed to pick any 2 active drives. This makes the system useable, a CD-ROM however would have been nice.
 
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