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SYSINFO/guide/gadgetdrives
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DRIVES GADGET
-------------

When this gadget is clicked another  window will open and display a gadget
for each floppy,  hard or rad drive  you have connected to  your Amiga. In
the middle of the window you  will see Information on the particular drive
that has its gadget highlighted. To  select a particular drive, just click
on  its gadget.  To re-read  the  same drive,  click in  its gadget  again
(useful for re-reading a floppy after a disk change).

SCSI GADGET
-----------                                   

NOTE    This function may  not work on some brands device  drivers and may
----    possibly  crash on  others. This  is due  to the  fact it  may not
        support the required commands. If this happens you may just see an
        error message in  the window for each device it  found that failed
        to respond to  the direct scsi command. Each  device's unit number
        will still  be displayed at the  start of each error  string under
        the 'ID'  heading. In this  case contact the manufacturer  of your
        hard  disk controller  and enquire  if  they have  an update  that
        supports CBM's 'HD_SCSICMD' command and RigidDiskBlock structure.


This gadget will be ghosted for drives that are obviously not SCSI drives,
The  SCSI function  will  display info  on all  drives  that are  operated
through a single device driver, there is  no need to click the SCSI gadget
for all drives, unless some use a different device driver name as shown in
the 'drives window'. Select one of the drives and click the SCSI gadget. A
new window will  open an attempt to  read all SCSI drives  on LUN (Logical
Unit Number)  zero. If valid drive  is found, various information  will be
displayed. This  information consists of  the drive 'ID', its  'TYPE', the
'MANUFACTURER', 'MODEL', and 'VERSION'. Also displayed is the ANSI version
of the device and the number of blocks the drive has.

The  drive's REAL  size  is  displayed and  if  the  drive supports  CBM's
RigidDiskBlock, the  formatted size  is also  displayed beside  the actual
size. This allows you to see if a larger drive than you thought you had is
in the computer.  I have seen some  A2500's with a formatted  size of 40MB
that actually had QUANTUM 52 Meg hard drive.

If your drive's  supplier has not followed CBM's  RigidDiskBlock then the 
formatted size  will not be  displayed, but  most users already  know the 
size they  beleive is in  the system. If  these sizes are  different then 
your hard drive will require partitioning and re-formatting correctly. If 
the  'REAL' size  is  smaller  than your  formatted  size  then you  will 
eventually  have  problems  so  your drive  will  still  need  formatting 
correctly.

It is often the case that the REAL size will be 1MB larger than FORMATTED.
This is  normal and due  to the fact that  the chosen number  of cylinder,
heads etc, will hardly ever exactly match the total block available on the
disk, and this remainder  can somtimes show up on the  REAL display, if it
is large enough.

SPEED
-----

This gadget will perform a 'read' speed  test on the selected drive. It is
very safe as it does not write at all. The result of the test is displayed
on the last line.  Timing for this test is done  via timer.device for best
accuracy. The test can be done on any  drive in the gadget list. To test a
particular drive, select its gadget and  then click the 'SPEED' gadget. If
a floppy  is selected, and it  does not have a  disk in the drive,  or the
particular drive cannot be 'locked' for some reason, the SPEED gadget will
be ghosted, and not selectable.

The size  and length of  the test, depends on  the partition or  disk. The
entire drive will  be read, unless the partition is  15megs or greater, in
those cases, 7 megs will will be read. I have found that reading more that
this is not necessary as the results do not change significantly.

This  function has  been tested  all forms  of drives  on various  Amigas,
including the CDROM drive in the CDTV, and the IDE drive in the A600.

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