🚀 go-pugleaf

In-reply-to:  imagen!atari!leavens@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU  (Alex Leavens)
> in article <7988@akguc.UUCP>, rbk@akguc.UUCP (R. Brad Kummer) says:
> > 
> > BTW, when ARE we going to see the updated hard disk driver (or whatever)
> > from Atari that allows booting from the hard disk???
> > 	
>   If we were working on such a thing, I'm sure we'd be trying very hard
> to get it out the door.  <grin>

I want to thank Alex for becoming active on the net and responding
to people's questions.  However, I was a little disappointed at
his uninformative answer above.  Perhaps he is unaware of the history
surrounding this issue.

Late last summer, someone at Atari said that such a program was
already finished, was being used in-house at Atari, and would be
released shortly after it had been tested thoroughly.  It never
was.

A couple of months ago, Allan Pratt explained on the net that when
he boots his machine, he simply inserts a blank floppy and the machine
boots automatically from the hard disk.  So apparently the program
is still being used in-house at Atari.

We were also told that the reason it had not been released to the
world was because it can be tricky to recover from a bad boot sector
or bad programs in the C:\AUTO folder on the hard disk, for if the
machine crashes during booting, how can you delete the offending
files?  Atari wanted to be sure that people who encountered this
problem would have a way out other than calling Atari and asking
for help.  (Reasonable enough!)  

It seemed to me that an easy way to recover would be to have a floppy
with a valid boot sector, such as the original TOS-in-RAM system
disk.  Booting from this disk would bypass the hard disk boot,
allowing the machine to come up normally without running the programs
on the hard disk.  One could then install the hard disk driver and
go in and repair the C:\AUTO folder or rebuild the boot sector or
whatever.  If that indeed is the best strategy for recovery, then
it would be reaonable for Atari to make sure that anyone using the
program also had access to the recovery procedures by only
distributing the program with such a disk and not posting it to
the net.  But that has apparently not been done, either.

That's the last we've heard.  We know the program exists and has
been in daily use at Atari for over six months.  We just want to
know when we can have it.

--Mike Fischer <fischer@yale.arpa>

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