First post, by CwF
Awhile back I post about me resurrecting some old dual tualatin boards I've had collecting dust and have a winner emerging. The P3TDe6 now rocks after modernizing and and mix and match. It has stabilized with an ATI X2 AGP pro, a promise SX8 in a 64/66, and intel 1000 MT in a 64/66, and a Yamaha generic sound card in a 64/33 with 3 gig ca2 133 memory. A handful of other cards have been cycled through tested. It is functional for me now, but I have an issue I could fix if it were not for Windows XP.
Preferably I would like to run its duties off a single SSD on the SX8 (*which sucks btw but coexist with the ATI). It had a passive 6 six disk backplane and a caged removable 5 disk setup, now just the cage. Under previous systems I could load or mount and dismount live. Under XP the test haven't been so good. Earlier windows had an effective aspi layer to accomplish this. I've come to the conclusion ASPI died with W2K, so those tools are not available under XP. So any scsi guys know how to power down a scsi disk, and later power up, without reboots and without complaining?
So far, I essentially hacked much of W2K scsi subsystem into XP and had lots of weird results, but did get some buslogic flashpoints working.
Pitched that. The post 4.6 adaptec layers are not stable, the edition for XP is incomplete, and I stopped before trying third party layers. So instead of make the tool compatible, I am looking for a new tool. I'm miles from the machine now, but am stewing on it. An idea came from one of the disc controllers I tested which could make any sata removable on that machine under XP. Yes I know it is part of the spec for sata, it is for scsi also. So if there are settings for sata to act as a removeable or boot drive in XP, then maybe they could be applied to scsi. The basic write cache sure, beyond that I haven't researched yet. A cheat may be mount points, no letters, disable cache, and just yank it out with nothing open on it. XP does a check on boot, and I have dynamically mounted them, but XP soon request a reboot to be proper with the disc I'm done with already. I clicked a button under W2K, disc off. I'm missing something.
Suggestions?
I used to know what I was doing...