Adaptec host adapter
7 messages in this thread
I have a problem with the following setup. A 486/33 with 16 MB RAM, AMI
BIOS. I have installed an Adaptec AHA-154XB SCSI card with all settings at
factory default. To this card I want to attach a Pinnacle Micro Magneto
optical drive REO-130S and a Texel DM-3024 CD-ROM drive. I have included
ASPI4DOS.SYS and ASPIDISK.SYS in my CONFIG.SYS file. But on boot up I get
an error message before the drivers in CONFIG.SYS starts to load. The
message flashes by, but seem to state "Host adapter not found". Later on
when CONFIG.SYS starts to run neither of the SCSI related drivers are
loaded. Thus when I try to run AFDISK.EXE it informs me that it can't be
done because the ASPIMANAGER isn't loaded. Can I get out of this dilemma?
Also, there is no CD-ROM driver included in the disk with the adaptec card?
How do I get one? None was supplied with the Texel.
Rene Andersson
It sounds like the Adaptec is jumpered to a non-standard I/O address and
the on-board BIOS is not finding the I/O registers where it expects them.
Am I correct in assuming that you're booting from a non-SCSI drive and that
this jumpering is deliberate? If so, then the BIOS warning is ok and you
need to put something on the ASPI4DOS command line to tell it how the card
is jumpered. The BIOS is only needed to emulate standard disk controllers.
Is ASPIDISK appropriate for your optical drive? I thought it was only
suitable for non-removable disks.
The CDROM driver is not bundled with the host adapter and must be purchased
separately. You might instead consider buying the Corel (same people who
make the Draw! paint program) driver package ($70-$100) which comes with
drivers for lots of non-hard-disk SCSI devices, including a large selection
of CDROM drives and tape drives. Corel has the advantage of actually
supporting end-users, unlike Adaptec. I think that they have a forum here.
It is jumpered to A330h which is the factory setting. Because it doesn't
reboot the ASPI4DOS and ASPIDISK won't load. I disabled the SCSI BIOS and
then the drivers loaded, but when I tried to access drive D: (created by
ASPIDISK) I got a general read failure. I the loaded AFDISK to create a
partition, it tells me that the SONY driver is available )OEM for Pinnacle)
"Select SCSI Device to Partition
HA #0 – Target 0 SONY SMO-C301-00
and then: "ERROR OCCURRED DURING IO OPERATION !!
Read Capacity Command. Check Status Returned. (target 0) CDB: 25 00 00 00
00 00 00 00 00 00
— Press <Esc> to continue –
Other cards in the machine is an Intel SatisFAXtion 400 set to A340 IRQ10,
A Soundblaster Pro A220 IRQ7 (I think) and a Graphics Ultra from ATI with a
mouse attached to IRQ5. I disabled the SFAX just to make sure.
Any and all suggestions are greatly appreciated.
Rene
This is puzzling. An Inquiry command was obviously successful, as the drive
name and model number was successfully read (the "SONY SMO-C301-00"). The
Read Capacity command (opcode 25, the rest of the command is zeroes) fails,
but no real reason is given (general failure is DOS's way of saying "I
don't know what went wrong"). This command was supposed to query the number
of blocks on the drive, which would need to be done to give you the choice
of where to partition it. Perhaps there's some kind of verbose mode that
you can turn on so that the SCSI sense data will be displayed (this is
returned by the drive when a command fails). Pinnacle may be able to help;
there may be some magic required for this particular drive.
/POST
Kenneth,
I had some read and starting up problems with the Pinnacle REO130 and the
Future Domain adapter that comes with it. I was unable to solve them so I
change the board for a Corel one with corel drivers and all runs perfectly
(i love MOs). I don't know if there are some performance penalty between
the drivers and the BIOS (it have the label PM 1.0 on the chips) of the
Future Domain SCSI and the CorelSCSI kit.
I sent two faxes to Pinnacle with all of this and recieved no answer
(probably because I didn't sent the registration card before the fax).
Regards, Ana
ps.Do you know if Pinnacle has some people monitoring this forum or others?
I don't know, but they might have an Internet address, since they seem to
target the workstation crowd and a lot of Unix hardware vendors hang out on
the Internet. I find that Netnews and CIS fora don't always overlap,
especially in arcane matters like this, so it pays to check both.
Thanks Ken! It's a pity that they don't give support via CIS or a BBS:(
Thanks again, Ana