SCSI Hard Drive

[Cornish Jack]

Has anyone out there had any dealings with SCSI? I am refurbishing an old PC with a 486 Processor and basic bits that have all worked successfully in various configurations. The intended combination now is a Quantum 80 Mbs EIDE as the boot drive plus another Quantum SCSI 500Mbs as the data store. All works OK including the SCSI BIOS 'seeing' the 500Mg as Drive D. However the boot drive, at the moment running DOS 5 does not 'see' the SCSI drive at all and greets access attempts with 'Drive not valid'. All cabling and jumpers are set correctly and the host adapter (Adaptec 1542F) is recognised as ID 7 and the drive as ID 0. Apart from a little 'percussive technology with a Birmingham screwdriver' I am at a loss. It's not the end of the world if it doesn't work but if any of you Gurus have any suggestions, please be suggestive ! ! :) :)

[Feline]

CJ - I'm running a similar configuration - an EIDE drive as the boot C: drive, and a SCSI drive as D: (which can be certainly be addressed by DOS).

I have tried to work out how it works, but must admit to being baffled (used to be a time when one just analysed one's autoexec.bat and config.sys files but that doesn't seem to work anymore!)

It sounds as though you have sorted out the BIOS settings stored in CMOS, but I suspect that you need to load a second BIOS screen. My system boots and loads the BIOS; it then loads the CD-ROM driver and a couple of other drivers; then shows a message saying the Adaptec SCSI driver BIOS extension has been loaded, followed by "Hit Ctrl-A for SCSI settings".

Hitting Ctrl-A takes you to a SCSI set up screen which shows that both the disk and the adapter are identified as SCSI devices.

If you haven't got a driver diskette for your SCSI board you might venture to the Adaptec web site (www.adaptec.com ?) and see whether you can download a driver from there?

Alternatively, it might worth your while to load Windoze 95 (or 98) on your EIDE drive, reboot and see whether Plug & Pray picks up the SCSI Adapter and offers to configure it for you.

Also remember that the last SCSI device needs to be terminated - otherwise you get all sorts of weird and wonderful wobblies. That's usually a jumper on the disk.

One other point - you haven't got a whole stack of room on your EIDE drive, so I would recommend a minimum Windoze load - and you should relocate your swap file to your D: drive where you have a bit more room (otherwise the system will be REAL slow!)

Hope that helps ....

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Feline
(I Sit, I Watch, I Smile)


[This message has been edited by Feline (edited 02 February 2000).]

[Cornish Jack]

Feline
Many thanks for all of that. I was, in fact, going to try the W95 route 'cos I have a feeling that that was the OS the last time I tried a similar combination (which worked!).
I haven't tried the drivers as my 'bible' states categorically that if the only devices are hard drives, the ASPI drivers are not required. Still, it won't do any harm to try. Everything else is as you suggest, with the host BIOS doing it's thing correctly and identifying the D drive - but DOS doesn't (DOSN'T??) Time for another lie-down ! :)
I shall test the waters and report.
Again many thanks