CD tower - last word

[Gary E. Masters]

I think there has been some confusion about the CD tower.  It was hooked up
to a Novell server in 1994, then we used three smaller (Top Spin) servers
to give Internet access, then we moved the CD's to hard disk space on the
server because they crashed so often.  Left with an expensive  tower, we
wanted to attach it to the Government Documents workstation to hold the
most used CD's and protect them from handling.  

Then we had problems getting all of the drives to show in Windows and found
that the changing of SCSI cables during the shift from the LUN's to the Top
Spin servers (and back) had pushed some of the pins back and caused them to
not connect.  So we fixed that.  

Our last solution to the drive letter problem, after hearing from Procom
that there was not a software solution that they knew about was to convert
the hard drive to FAT32 and save a drive letter, to have only one drive
mapped to the network and use the rest for the 21 CD drives.  That ought to
do it.  It was very nice for Procom to help us after the warranty was over,
but they have been a good company for support on the few occasions we
needed it.  

So we have the tower attached to the workstation and used as a storage
device with rather fast access to the 21 most used CD's.  Of course
Microsoft could allow more than 27 drives, but perhaps there is a reason
why not.



Gary E. Masters
Automated Services Librarian
Texas A&M International University
(956) 326-2137 (voice)
(956) 326-2399 (fax)