Well, I talked about Stacker 2.0 back in October. Here's a summary, or
you can grab the full text from digest #17 by sending the following message
to ultralite-archive@csd.mot.com: "send digests/ulite-17". This may not be
quite what you had in mind, but at least it will get Stacker 2.0 installed
with a minimal C: drive and a maximal compressed E: drive. If you want, you
can run that program which exchanges C: and E: after boot to make the
compressed drive look like C:.
[...] As you may recall from my report on Stacker 1.1, my C: drive had
a big file on it called \STACKVOL.000 which Stacker used as a virtual E:
drive. That left very little space on C: -- just about 100KB total, of
which most was used by \MSDOS.SYS, \IO.SYS, \COMMAND.COM, \CONFIG.SYS,
and \AUTOEXEC.BAT. Also on the C: drive is a \STACKER directory which
contained the Stacker device driver and SCHECK.EXE (a CHKDSK for Stacker
volumes). The point of all of this is that on an UltraLite, you want to
assign as much of the C: drive to the Stacker volume as you can, leaving
room only for the files necessary to boot and get the Stacker volume
mounted. That all worked fine.
The problem was that Stacker's "smart" install program tries to dump
everything onto the C: drive: the new device driver, utilities like
SCHECK, a full-screen text editor (!?), the install program itself,
and even some files related to the hardware coprocessor you can get
for Stacker! Needless to say, this stuff didn't fit on my C: drive.
In the process of discovering this junk, I corrupted something and I
could no longer boot.
Booting from the ROMs still worked, so I "decided" to do a full
install instead of an upgrade. Praying that my backup would be
restorable (I backed up files, not the Stacker volume :-), I wiped
off the C: drive, did a SYS C:, and did a fresh install. On to
the second thing which I didn't like.
After polluting my C: drive with all of those horrid files, the
"smart" install lets you select from a few menu options and then
create a Stacker volume. I figured I'd go ahead with it, even
though I knew that I'd probably want to remove it and make another
one somehow after I removed unneeded files. Well, it simply didn't
do it! No error message, nothing. It just came back as though it
had done its duty.
[...] I was able to use the SCREATE command directly to create a Stacker
volume. I'm happy to say that it no longer makes you leave a minimum of
100KB uncompressed on a boot drive. In fact, my first attempt left a
mere 4096 bytes! Figuring I needed a little more margin than that, I did
it again leaving about 60KB. I'm using it now and it seems to be working
fine.
> Does it [PC/GEOS] work if I can get a 2 Meg stacker volume?
Yes. The info for that is in digests #17 and #18. It's a bit lengthy to
repeat here. Some of the specifics will need modification for GeoWorks Pro.
The original text was written for Ensemble 1.2. I still use GeoWorks on
the UltraLite quite regularly. I have a full copy on a portable hard disk
and a subset on the silicon hard disk. Works great!
--
-Brian Smithson
Motorola Inc., Computer Group, Commercial Systems Division
10700 N. De Anza Boulevard, Cupertino, CA 95014 USA, (408)366-4104
brian@csd.mot.com, {apple | pyramid}!motcsd!brian