Subject: Re: II GS help/easy one From: mfumu@alphalink.com.au (Bill Robbins) Date: Mon, Dec 14, 1998 1357s Message-id: In article <3675237f.0@news.pacifier.com>, "Scott H" wrote: > Hello, > I am a teacher and had an Apple II GS donated to our class. It will only > boot to a purple-bordered screen that says something about system disc or > whatever. I went to the official Apple site, found a set of 7 system discs I > could download, but none would get me past the dreaded screen described > above. > Is there a master boot disc I am not finding, or some other solution? > Thanks, Scott A bit more detail would be helpful, but here's a try. The original GS/OS 6.0.1 came on six disks, not seven, so I have no idea what the seventh disk is. However the other six: /Install /SystemTools1 /SystemTools2 /SynthLAB /Fonts /System.Disk /System.Disk should boot from a 3.5 inch drive and is an absolute minimum system disk. Unfortunately the system disk has to stay on line so if you don't have two 3.5 inch drives you can't do much with it. /Install will also boot and is the disk from which you can install a full system on a hard drive (or Iomega Zip, etc.) To use a hard drive you'll also need to have a SCSI interface card unless you get one of the drives-on-a-card available. Following the on screen instructions is FAIRLY self explanatory, if I remember correctly. Another possible problem, but one I'm sure you must have taken care of, is that the downloaded files have almost certainly been encoded and archived, and will need to be decoded before they can be of use. The purple border can be changed by pressing Open-Apple Control Escape, pressing RETURN to get into the Control Panel, selecting Display to get into a number of options you can set to what you like including border color, background color and text color. Use the <- and -> keys to cycle through the options. The changes will be reflected immediately. Hit RETURN when your done to get back to the Control Panel menu. But before you leave the control panel itself, check one more setting which could be the cause of your boot problem. Select Slots and press RETURN. Check the last item on the menu, StartUp. If it doesn't show "Scan" (or Slot 7), select it and cycle through to that option. Hit RETURN to save the change and return to the Control Panel. Then hit ESCAPE RETURN twice to get back to where you started. Hope this is of some help. Bill Robbins mfumu@alphalink.com.au