Weird issue in DOS with ATAPI ZIP \ VOGONS

Weird issue in DOS with ATAPI ZIP

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First post, by EZFlyer

Posted on 2018-07-17, 19:26

EZFlyer Offline

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Having a weird issue where when a certain device is under SCSI BIOS control, the ASPIATAP.SYS driver for my Zip does something weird and DOS says it can't find any files after that driver loads and then it asks for a command interpreter location. The device is a Fujitsu 2.3gb MO drive, tried both MBR and Superfloppy formatting. The SCSI card is a 29160N. The boot device is a Syquest EZ135. Tried both DOS 6 and 6.22. The issue happens under no other circumstance even with a different 2nd disk drive under BIOS control, tried a Jaz. When I throw in a boot floppy to provide a command interpreter and try to access the boot volume, I get a general failure, INT24h.

Any ideas? I'm about to give up.

Reply 1 of 5, by ATauenis

Posted on 2018-07-17, 20:02

ATauenis Offline

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Probably the drive is more IDE than ATAPI. At the level of DOS ASPI drivers they are different interfaces. And SCSI is something else too. 😀

You need right ASPI drivers and right Device drivers for all buses and devices. Probably they won't work at same time (i.e. only ATAPI or IDE devices will be usable at one time).

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Reply 2 of 5, by EZFlyer

Posted on 2018-07-17, 21:20

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Running Adaptec aspi drivers for the card. Iomega for the zip. It is one of the atapi versions (apparently there were three).

Someone brought up a good point on winworld about scsi bios translation. I don’t know where exactly the cutoff is, but besides the Jaz, the MO drive is the only connected disk over 1GB. Actually I think the Jaz is just under 1GB, 1021MB or something.

Reply 3 of 5, by EZFlyer

Posted on 2018-07-18, 15:05

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Turning off translation had no effect. Back to no ideas.

Reply 4 of 5, by tincup

Posted on 2018-07-18, 15:14

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Under the category of "unhelpful suggestions" Zip drives drove me/us crazy back in the day. My solution - wait for it - was to toss all my zip gear. Again, an unhelpful suggestion but even after all these years a zip rant flows effortlessly... Not finding files on Zip rives happened *all* the time.

Reply 5 of 5, by EZFlyer

Posted on 2018-07-18, 18:14

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Not realllly what I was looking for, but thanks for the chuckle. I never had one as a kid and always wanted one. Unfortunately, I can't find an internal SCSI one for cheap on eRape. So far my drives are running strong. Long story short, I need to use them as it's the fastest way to move downloads from my Mac to the DOS machine. Literally any SCSI drives and adapters that can be used for old samplers/keyboards are on the rape train.

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