Spectre GCR Manual Manuals - Atari Documentation Archive

o Appendix E: Hard Disk Tips
Appendix E: Hard Disk Tips
• After formatting Spectre partitions from the Spectre menu
page, you should always reboot. Otherwise, GEM may try to access
data on that partition, not realizing the partition has been subverted to
Spectre format. It could damage the Spectre directory and boot data, or
whatever. Let GEM reboot, it'll figure out the partition is off-limits to
GEM, and reshuffle the icons.
• Beware this icon shuffle. You'll note how the icons are assigned
one at a time, starting at "C", to the next available GEM-only partition.
If you change a GEM partition in the middle of a bunch of GEM
partitions, all the GEM partitions past it will shift down one letter as of
next reboot.
• I strongly recommend purchasing a copy of lCD's or Supra's
Hard Disk Utilities, to help keep track of your hard disk and what's
going on in general. They are extremely valuable, and have saved me
many times.
• When you format Spectre partitions, you'll temporarily lose the
autoboot ability of your disk drive (to autoboot into ST mode at all).
No sweat! Just re-run the "Enable Boot" program, to re-enable hard
disk autoboot. This happens because tweaking the partition table to
tell GEM we're taking over a partition upsets a flag that tells GEM that
the hard disk is bootable.
• Atari's driver software quits looking for partitions on a drive,
and assigns drive icon letters to partitions, as soon as it finds a non­
GEM one. Thus, you end up with GEM partitions you cannot access if
you put a Spectre partition in the middle of a group of GEM partitions,
and use Atari's hard disk boot software. (lCD's and Supra's software is
smarter than that.)
• If you have more than one hard disk (alright!), they are
mounted in ascending SCSI and LUN order. 0,0; 0,1; 1,0 ... etc. Then
they are displayed in the ''Hard Disk" menu, so you can check there.
Note that deselecting a drive in the "Devices ... " menu changes this
order. That order determines what Function key hooks to what partition,
so keep a eye on it.
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