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DRIVES GADGET
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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
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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
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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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