General Control over 7.1 on Powerbook 180c, one drive

[Punkyclown]

Hi All, Got some system disks for my 180c and was able to load system, setup ram drive. But I need help
to maximize the Mac. First, My Mac has 14 msg of ram. How big of a ram drive should I have? Second, System
Cache, what does this optimize? what size should it be? Does this help in any way the the incessant disk swapping?
Do you recommend starting up in the Ram Disk, is it possible on a one drive system? Now moving on, the system
recognizes my HD but says it can not be initialized. Is there low level format, what should my next step be? Also
I have connected a SCSI CD-Rom drive but the system doesn't see it. What needs to be added to 7.1 in order
for it too see it? Lastly, now that I have purchased system disks how can I copy them to protect my investment.
Seems I can not copy the System disk?
All your help is much appreciated.

Brad Hansen

 

[Cory Cooper]

Hello,

There's a blast from the past!

The RAM Disk wasn't designed to be used to load the entire system into to run from. It was more of a cache, like the Disk Cache option. It was used more for Macs running as a server than for daily use. I always had that option turned off.

The Disk Cache is best at the default (32K?) setting, or 64K-256K. It helps speed thing up a bit due to storing recently/frequently used disk information in RAM.

You may be able to use a USB floppy drive to mount the disks and create a disk image of them. But, I do remember that it can be a bit tricky, since modern Macs don't support the older disk formats.

C