I wrote Upright after becoming frustrated that my Mac would often not boot from the disk I specified with the “Startup Disk” Control Panel. I am the happy owner of a device called “PowerKey™” from Sophisticated Circuits, inc. This device allows me to turn on my whole system with the power key on my ADB keyboard. The problem is that my hard disks need a little more time to spin up that my Mac does to start up. To make matters worse, the disk I normally don’t want to start up from comes up a little quicker than the disk I normally do want to start up from. The result is that my Mac would almost always start up with the wrong disk. It wouldn’t start up right.
Solution:
Upright is a System Extension which makes sure that your Mac will start up with the right disk if at all possible. Upright has the following function:
IF (Actual Startup Disk is not the same as Requested Startup Disk)
AND (Requested Startup Disk is now available)
THEN (Restart the Macintosh).
Actual Startup Disk is determined by the details of how your system starts up (physics, timing, electronics, firmware, …).
You specify “Requested Startup Disk” using the “Startup Disk” Control Panel (“Startup Device” under System 6).
Upright should be installed on all your disks which have System Folders. Install Upright by placing it in the “Extensions” folder (“System Folder” under System 6).
Hint:
You can give “Requested Startup Disk” the best opportunity of being available when Upright runs by installing a disk mounting System Extension so that it runs before Upright during startup. You can
accomplish this by putting both System Extensions in the same folder and making sure that the disk mounter has a name which is alphabetically before Upright. The proper folder for System Extensions is “Extensions” (“System Folder” under System 6).
