Help needed getting A2SCSI card visible on Apple IIgs

[Retronaut]

This is a re-post from Apple Fritter forums, as this is a pretty specific problem, I thought it best to spread my net wider...

Hey, I am relatively new to the Apple IIgs, and in my enthusiasm to get it up to the level of an Amiga 2000, I decided to buy a SCSI card, and ideally install GSOS to a hard disk and boot from it. This seems to be, possibly a faster method than booting from a smart port disk?

So to do this I bought an A2SCSI card from GGLabs a couple of years back, and only now am I installing it, as I also have an Apple Squeezer card. With the two in place, the machine should be pretty sweet. But not quite yet...

So, the rub... Having installed a working GSOS 6.0.4 installation to a Smartport disk using an emulator and a FloppyEMU, I can get my IIgs to boot to GSOS 6.0.4, which is all good. When booting, the OS complains (at differing points on each boot) that it cant load in the hard disk, because this requires drivers... which is kind of expected. The GGLabs site, provides a disk image of those drivers, and I have installed these into the 6.0.4 install, using its supplied installer, but sadly after a reboot, the issue persists.

I have used another disk that GGLabs provided, a SCSI Utility that can check the Hard Disks, and partition them as well, but this only works AFAIK when booted as a floppy. The same utils do not appear to work when your IN GSOS, which is a little frustrating (but this was the 80s after all... )The good news is, it saw all 5 SCSI drive images I had put on a BlueSCSI and reported them all at their correct sizes, 32mb each, and one at 256mb as an experiment. And I can also choose one of the 32mb drives, and partition it, though oddly the Util only seems to allow me to add two partitions of 10mb each.....

So, now I find myself in two worlds. GSOS WITH the correct drivers installed, refuses to see the BlueSCSI's Drives during or post boot, even when partitioned. But, if I boot from the SCSI Utilities disk (floppy) I CAN see them. So it appears the A2SCSI card IS working perfectly fine, and having read the manual for the original card it was based on, it states there it CAN be used as a boot device for a IIgs.

Does anyone know what the magic sauce is here? Is it an issue with GSOS 6.0.4? I assume not as it was recommended because it fixes various bugs, so I assume it is MORE compatible with hard drives etc, not less. Did I install the drivers incorrectly in some way?

And the original manual for the original SCSI card that this card is based on, is VERY technical, but never goes into the nitty gritty of how to install it on a IIgs for example.There appears to be a missing link. You'd assume there would be an official install Floppy disk set for this card, but...Any help appreciated, its not a hardware issue here, its software (or me)

 

[Retronaut]

An update on the issue, and yes, its certainly VOODOO

I found 3x .hda images on the BlueSCSI site, one is a basic install of GSOS 6.0.1, one is a complete install and the 3rd is a custom install of 6.0.4. So... to confuse things, whoever made these images made them as 100mb files. So they are apparently partitioned into 3 ProDos disks, Blue1, 2 and 3. So I copied the 6.0.4 image to be BlueSCSI as ID 6 and gave it a go....

And it booted!

But... this is where it gets weirder. During the boot, it complained the device it was booting from could not be used, because of.... yes, those pesky drivers.... And yet it completed booting and on the GSOS desktop there was only one drive, Blue1. Blue2 and 3 were nowhere to be found. Very odd.

So as it was 6.0.4, it has the Advanced Disk Tools util, and I loaded it, and its started by pointing at Blue1, the boot disk. It complained that it could not do anything with this disk, because of a lack of drivers. Gah! But of course it complains about this even when I specifically INSTALLED the drivers and reboote.

This, of course is not satisfactory. Why?

1. How can I make images such as these? I cant even SEE the hard disk to install the OS to when I boot from a Floppy Emu (maybe they conflict in some way). But I guess not, its more to do with this missing (not missing) drive issue. Is there an emulator that can mount .hda files?
2. I want to SHOW people how to do this, but I cannot even do it myself, because of the heavy dose of VOODOO chilly here
3. Although this works, it does not, in some major ways, for example the boot disk cannot be seen by its own HD utils
4. Where are the other two partitions?

Anyway, forget partitions, what about other drives? I renamed the 6.0.4 HDA to 50, and copied the 6.0.1 basic install onto the BlueSCSI card, so now I have TWO drives on it, 6.0.1 being the boot. I flipped the switch, it booted and.... Only the first Blue1 disk appeared, I GUESS because both images have a Blue1 drive, and ONLY one drive with the same name can be shown.

So yeah, some movement forward. But still not a clear path to getting where I want to be i.e. setting it up from scratch myself, having multiple partitions appear as 32mb disks, and NOT having the driver issue.

 

[Retronaut]

Anyone? no response, in the meantime, I have made some progress with this on other forums. At least in terms of what the issue might be....

I'm beginning to think there is some kind of mis-configuration between my card and the GGLabs design. I have a feeling it could be the ROM, maybe it has been incorrectly written with the original Apple SCSI ROM. The GGLabs product page states it has altered the original ROM slightly to remove its ID configuration and instead hard-coded this to 7 in hardware and on a PATCHED ROM and Driver set. Maybe the ROM on my card does not have this patched, so it does not work with the patched drivers (or any others).

I was wondering if anyone reading this who has one of these cards working, would happen to have an EPROM burner? If so, would it be possible to read the data from your working card and post it here? I can then check this vs my cards ROM and see if they match. What also would really help is a decent, well lit, 4k photo of the chip side of a working card. Who knows, maybe my card has a naughty chip in use on it.

 

[@GamesMissed]

I was never able to get the downloaded GS/OS images linked to from the BlueSCSI website to work. I ended up using a blank 32 MB ProDOS image set as HD60 on my BlueSCSI, then installing GS/OS 6.04 to that from scratch from the floppy images, using a FloppyEMU. My BlueSCSI doesn't have any trouble booting from that hard drive image.

I don't have a GGLabs SCSI card, though, I have a reproduction Cirtech. Don't know if that difference matters to your use case.

 

[Retronaut]

Ah hey, about 6 weeks back now I saw an original Apple High Speed SCSI card on the market in the US. I bought it and it took its sweet time to get over here to me in London. Early this week I dug out the IIgs, found the BlueSCSI nestled inside, took it out, and removed the GGLabs SCSI card. I then replaced it with the AHSS Card, and tried booting.

Well, it DID start to boot, but would always hang GSOS 6.4 at around 5%, which was quite frustrating. I totally broke the machine down, getting it back to vanilla, no dice. Then I tried booting from my FloppyEMU, smartport HD of GSOS 6.4 and it was the same, 5% load and a hang. I fiddled around with the machines settings, nothing. So then I removed the battery, and tried setting it up again. At some point, something fixed "it" the problem, whatever it was and it booted!

I put the AHSS Card back in, and it also booted Then I re-built the machine, and it carried on working. So then I put some more images onto the BlueSCSI's SD card and lo and behold when it booted I now had 3 drives, not just the one boot drive. This AHSS card fully works, as I would expect it to, I can now mount multiple HDs in GSOS and I assume if I add a CD-Rom and whatnot, those will also work (a battle for another day...)

So this was it, proof, my IIgs was not broken, or weird or something. The fault appears to be with the GGLabs SCSI card and to date, months onwards I still have received ZERO tech support from GGLabs. It's a BIG pity, if I were to review their card right now, well, Id have to really dump on them sadly. The card was not cheap, it does not work and I have had zero response to several emails to them.

Worse, what do I do with it now? Maybe it WILL work in someone elses machine. So do I sell it?