🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <memo.895245@cix.compulink.co.uk>
amclintock@cix.compulink.co.uk writes:

>Hard Disk Whinge
>I don't like my IDE drive/controller
>which I bought from ICS.
>
>1) 25second boot up time (with RiscOs2)
>2) window bugs in filer, paths longer
>   than 40 chars (or so) cause windows larger
>   than they need to be. (big gaps to the right)
>   Or perhaps this is a riscos bug.
>3) The occasional bad drive error.
>
>
>I still haven't got a satisfactory answer to these
>questions. I suppose I can't really complain
>though since I have had it for three months+
>
>Does anyone know why the "*map" command
>fills my screen with bits of free space.
>Shouldn't it all be in one continuous block?
>*compact reduces it a bit...

I think perhaps you will be happier with your HD interface when you have
spent a little more time with it. No offense meant, but it does look as if
you have not been using the Archimedes for very long, so perhaps some
things are worrying you when they should not. I have had an ICS IDE drive
and controller for well over a year now and have been very happy with it -
it works reliably and fast. To answer your questions, though:

1) Boot-up will take longer than on a floppy-only system, as the computer
must wait for the hard drive to spin up. Until this has happened, the IDE
Filer cannot read the disc name to display underneath the disc icon.

2) This is a feature of the main filer application (which is in the main
OS ROM); filer windows belonging to ADFS and other filing systems also
behave in this way.

3) Bad drive errors are usually caused by badly-written software, not the
filing system itself. You presumably only have a singe IDE drive attached;
this will have a device number of 4. Some badly-written software
(particularly games) assume the selected filing system is ADFS and try to
read files explicitly from device 0 (the floppy drive).

Finally, the *map command displays the free space as a list of "bits", as
the free space on the disc is fragmented over the disc. This is normal,
and RISC OS does a fairly decent job keeping fragmentation to a minimum.

Graham