Vince Briel wrote: > I have my original ][+ that I've had for 20years now. I never had a hard > drive for it, but it would be nice to be able to back up some of my disks. > Can I use a focus hard drive? The specs I've read about say for the ][e > or ][gs? I don't know whether the Focus would work, but you would be able to use the original Apple SCSI Card (but _not_ the High Speed, one, which requires an enhanced IIe or later machine). There are also some much older hard drives and controller cards (like the Sider) which would work on the II+. Apple's 5 MB or 10 MB ProFile would work, but I'd hesitate to recommend it, since it is very difficult to do a low level format (you need an Apple /// with the right hardware and software, and special firmware to install into the drive). > Also, can you use DOS 3.3 or do you have to use prodos? All "recent" hard drive interfaces (including all SCSI cards, the Focus and even the ProFile) only support ProDOS (and Apple II Pascal 1.3, which can use the ProDOS driver on the card). Older hard drive interface cards which were designed for the II+ (like the Sider) generally have support for DOS 3.3, and if they are old enough, they won't support ProDOS at all. I think the Sider was able to partition the drive into regions for use by DOS 3.3, ProDOS, Pascal and CP/M. It is difficult to use DOS 3.3 on a hard drive, because the file system was only designed to allow a volume size up to 400 KB, with no support for subdirectories, so you can't organise the files on the volume (other than physically rearranging the order of directory entries, and using tricks like fake files as headers). The hard drive interface cards with special support for DOS 3.3 usually work by making use of the "volume" mechanism to logically divide a larger hard drive into multiple volumes, each of which is either 140 KB (the same size as a 5.25" disk) or 400 KB (the maximum size supported by DOS 3.3). To switch volumes, you use the 'V' parameter in a DOS command, e.g. CATALOG,V1 CATALOG,V2 etc. There are a maximum of 253 volume numbers available, so with 140 KB logical volumes, you have a maximum of 34.5 MB (35420 KB) which can be accessed on a single physical drive. With 400 KB logical volumes, the limit is 98.8 MB (101200 KB). Another complication of using DOS 3.3 with a hard drive is that the operating system has to be patched to work with anything apart from a 5.25" floppy drive. These patches usually work by disabling some standard part of DOS 3.3, e.g. the ability to format a floppy disk. With ProDOS, the maximum volume size is 32 MB, and it supports subdirectories, which makes file organisation much easier on large volumes. If you have a hard drive which is larger than 32 MB, SCSI cards allow you to partition the drive, given the right software. You can easily access two partitions (as drive 1 and drive 2), but exceeding this limit is a little tricky. If you are running ProDOS-8 1.2 or later and the SCSI card is in slot 5, and you don't have a disk controller card (or something which looks like one) in slot 2, then ProDOS can provide access to a third and fourth partition, which are logically remapped as S2,D1 and S2,D2. (This feature must be supported by the SCSI card - it is supported by Apple's one, but might not be by some third-party cards.) ProDOS-8 1.9 is the last version which works on the II+, unless you replace the CPU with something which is compatible with the 65C02 (and most standard 65C02 processors won't work in the II+). With ProDOS-8 2.0 or later, ProDOS supports remapping extra drives into all slots which don't have disk controller cards, so you have a theoretical limit as high as 12 partitions, depending on the SCSI card and what is in your other slots. The original Apple SCSI card only supports 7 partitions in total. Another one worth noting is the RamFast SCSI card. I don't know whether it would work on a II+, but it supports manual assignment of extra partitions to any unused slot/drive, and can do this with any ProDOS version. -- David Empson dempson@actrix.gen.nz