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intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Tue Mar 15, 2022 8:50 am

For the few folks out there lucky enough to have an original Microbotics Starboard with the SCSI expansion called the StarDrive, or perhaps for those that invested in the newly reverse-engineered StarDrive R2 from 2021, you've got some exciting new software to go along with them now.
ogStarDrive.jpg
The original StarDrive with boot floppy by Microbotics. These would hook to physically large, really loud yet small (by today's standards) 20-40MB hard drives. The floppy disk is required to boot the hard drive in Workbench.


On March 14, 2022, Brenner released an updated Microbotics StarDrive SCSI driver, which contains several enhancements and bug fixes.

Brenner:
A set of useful tools are also provided, including a software autoboot tool that allows for warm booting directly from the hard drive.
"Useful tools" is a very humble way of stating that some of his new software is really, really kick ass!

The LHA package found on Aminet appears to contain a full version and "lite" version.

From the Lite documentation:
It has a smaller memory footprint, and is ideal for those who don't need all the features of the full driver. Note that this driver does work with the Xetec CDx filesystem in Direct SCSI mode, and this provides support for CD-ROM drives without the memory overhead of the full driver.

FEATURES AND ENHANCEMENTS
-------------------------
-Supports Commodore's SCSI-Direct specification.
-Now uses Commodore's standard SCSI unit format for specifying the SCSI ID of a drive.
The FULL version, however, has all of the goodies.

From the Tools Documentation:
The Microbotics StarDrive SCSI module is not an autobooting SCSI controller, and in order to use it you must first boot your Amiga from a floppy disk. If you find yourself periodically rebooting your machine, then waiting for the system to come back up from floppy can be tedious.

This is where the autoboot tool comes in. Thanks to the updated StarDrive driver, you can now use HDToolBox to partition your hard drive, and this partition information can be used at boot time to automatically mount partitions, and boot directly from the hard drive.
That right there is a very cool update to some ancient hardware and software. Wow!

Also, there is another very useful tool in the package called Autochange.
The 1.3 FastFileSystem does not check for disk changes. In fact, it can't even detect whether or not there is a disk in the drive; it just always assumes
that a disk is present.

This behavior creates a problem for removable media. If you have, for example, some FFS formatted Zip disks, and you swap disks, the filesystem will have no idea that there is a new disk in the drive. In order to make the file system aware of the new disk you must issue the DiskChange command from a command line. This process can become tiresome very quickly.

The autochange tool provides a solution. It will wait for a disk change, and then force the file system into the correct state based on whether a disk was ejected or inserted. Since the FFS cannot recognize the absence of a disk, it will display the message "Not a DOS Disk" when there is no disk in the drive.
This is like a gift from the gods. I can't wait to check these out! :boing: <3





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