I wonder if the eject button will "eject" the mounted disk image if pressed. Does the drive activity light work with the emulator? Both the light and the eject button connect to the daisy chain board. The eject button is software controlled, although unlike a Mac, you can arbitrarily eject a disk while its mounted on the GS/OS desktop. It basically does the equivalent of a "Command-Shift-3" although when connected to a Mac, the eject button doesn't function at all. The button is needed to change disks in ProDOS as some software doesn't software auto eject floppies when requesting another disk be inserted. GS/OS is similar to MacOS and even uses the same dialogs when it wants another disk inserted. The machine has full software eject like the Mac, but you can eject on command by pushing the button if you wish.

Now I'm confused. Is the daisy chain board part of the 800k IIgs floppy drive, or is it something different? If it's part of the drive, then why didn't Floppy Emu work when you first tried connecting it to the drive's pass-through port?

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Inside the drive is a raw Sony DSDD floppy drive, the same as found in period Macs. It is connected to a board that holds the DB-19 pass-through to connect another drive and the cable that goes to the computer. This board also seems to handle the eject button in addition to interpreting the "3.5DISK" signal on pin 4 and the Drive Select Signals. On a Mac, its just dead weight.

Uniserver's crashing problem is likely related to the bad capacitors causing system stability problems. If GS/OS had a problem accessing the disk, it would have crashed well before reaching the installer as the boot process loads quite a few files from disk (a real drive seeks A LOT on boot). It would have also kicked back a system error regarding reading disks with the sliding Apple. Dumping to monitor usually means memory is getting trashed.