Working with Catalyst

This turned out not to be as bad as I’d thought.  The first Catalyst disk I tried (which I’d made from an image I stumbled across somewhere in the dark recesses of the net) immediately popped up a Drive Not Ready error.  Since the activity light on the ProFile didn’t blink, I suspect that this particular copy was configured to look for a ProFile controller in a different slot.  Catalyst doesn’t do any kind of automatic slot scanning, and there’s no menu option to reconfigure this – you have to go in with a sector editor and make some changes to the disk itself if you want Catalyst to look somewhere else.

As I couldn’t be bothered to load up the sector editor (I’m old and tired) or open up the /// and manually move the card, I took the easy way out.  I had better luck with Dave Ottalini’s disks, as Catalyst recognized the ProFile and loaded the program list from the configuration file it found.

I poked around a bit in the application configuration options, before diving in and running a few applications.

Here, my luck ran out, as almost every application failed to start, a number of somewhat cryptic error messages popping up:

I decided to take another approach, and as I was browsing the ProFile directories with the System Utilites disk, I ran into the real problem:

I don’t have one of the ProFile low level format kits (available on eBay for a mere $300 or so… sheesh), but the drive passes the inital diagnostics that run at power up, so I’m hoping I can reformat and install a new set of programs.  The existing data, unfortunately, is probably lost but that’s how it goes sometimes.   I learned that someone wrote an Apple /// driver for Rich Dreher’s excellent CompactFlash for Apple card, so I may just shelve the ProFile for now and continue playing with the Apple ///’s mass storage capabilities in a different area.  I wonder if Catalyst can be made to work with the CFFA…