ST Hard Drive Cold Booter
By: Michael Hill
(C) Copyright 1991 Hillsoft Software

No permission is granted to modify this file in anyway without permission of
the above author.  This program may only be distributed with the program file
and this readme file.  A small fee may be charged for the disk this program 
may be contained on.  This fee should not exceed $5.00

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What is ST HDCB?  Well this program is mainly for hard drive users who are
tired of having to turn on their St AFTER the hard drive comes up to speed.
I have found this an annoying and somewhat inhibiting feature of the ST Roms.
Just place ST HDCB in an Autofolder on a floppy and stick it in your A drive.
Now when you turn on your ST just turn everything on at one time (very easy
if your on a circuit box of some sort) and your ST will automatically boot
from the A drive since the hard drive hasnt came up to speed.  After ST HDCB
has loaded it will delay for 25 seconds (I have found this more than enough
for most drives) and then reboot your system.  Upon the reboot your hard drive
will kick in and boot.  Its as simple as that!  And if you dont want to wait
for the delay hit a key and it will abort the delay and reset automatically.

I think this program is ideal for BBS sysops or other people who rely on their
system always being booted.  Along with a program like Stargem (c) on your
hard drive, you can automatically load any GEM program you need.

Is the 25 seconds too much?  Well I was too lazy to write a program to modify
the delay for you, but if you have a sector editor the byte to modify is at
offset 0x189 (thats hexadecimal).  Change that to some value between 1-255. 
It is at 0x19 right now.

This software is not guaranteed to be bug free.  Any harm or data loss done to
your system is your own problem (dont you hate these parts!).  I have done
my best to test this software and believe it to be very safe.  But you never
know with some wild setups!

If you find this software useful why not drop me a couple bucks!  $5 would be
great.  If you can't spare a few bucks then just send me some mail letting me
know how ST HDCB worked for you.  Id love to hear from you.

mhill@hillsoftware.com					
