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DOS USB mass storage - undiscovered method?

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First post, by BurnedPinguin

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Recently I've been tinkering with this really nice Toshiba Satellite 320CDT, I was using USB to transfer files as it was the most convenient for me, but I found that 20 minute capped driver to be annoying. I came up with an idea that sounded stupid at first, but I tried it just in case, and it worked.

The key (or keys rather) are those "USB ASPI" drivers floating around. Any of them should work, but I've only tried this with the Panasonic one, which should support some amount of EHCI as well. This gets loaded in the CONFIG.SYS, and right after that, a driver from Adaptec called ASPIDISK.SYS. This driver is commonly used to initialise SCSI hard drives after the Adaptec driver for the SCSI controller. It just so happens that the Adaptec drivers for their SCSI controllers, and these "USB ASPI" drivers are using the same thing, so this driver will initialise any "hard drives" found by the "USB ASPI" drivers.

This method does allow for reading and writing from and to USB drives, and as an added bonus, it works in Windows 3.1, it gets picked up as a floppy drive for some reason.

I will include the Adaptec driver and all "USB ASPI" drivers I have, so that if you want to try this, you can try multiple drivers if one doesn't work.

IOMGOHCI.SYS: Iomega OHCI ASPI driver
IOMGUHCI.SYS: Iomega UHCI ASPI driver
MEDLOGIC.SYS: MediaLogic UHCI/OHCI/EHCI ASPI driver (take EHCI with a grain of salt)
NOVAC.SYS: Novac UHCI/OHCI ASPI driver
PANASONC.SYS: Panasonic UHCI/OHCI/EHCI ASPI driver (again, take EHCI with a grain of salt)
UHCIOHCI.SYS: Novac UHCI/OHCI ASPI driver (different version?)
ASPIDISK.SYS: Aforementioned Adaptec ASPI disk driver

Attachments

  • Filename
    USB.zip
    File size
    96.3 KiB
    Downloads
    241 downloads
    File comment
    Drivers
    File license
    Public domain

Reply 1 of 12, by Caluser2000

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Thanks for sharing.

There's a glitch in the matrix.
A founding member of the 286 appreciation society.
Apparently 32-bit is dead and nobody likes P4s.
Of course, as always, I'm open to correction...😉

Reply 3 of 12, by AppleSauce

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http://www.pcxt-micro.com/dos-usb.html

For Dos 6.22 and windows 3.1 I've used the Panasonic driver in tandem with the DI1000DD.SYS.
(commonly referred to as the “Motto Hairu USB Driver”) according to the site?.

"the following is an ASPI mass storage driver for USB-connected HDs and Compactflash memory cards
devicehigh=DI1000DD.SYS"

I Formatted a flash drive to fat16 , its a bit dodgy at times but seems to work alright (windows 3.1 seems to think its my cd drive and wigs out unless I pick the cd drive then the usb else it crashes if I just select the usb)

Reply 5 of 12, by AppleSauce

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Apparently there is also nj32disk.sys (ASPI DISK Driver Ver. 1.06 by Workbit Corp) , I don't know if you already have that in the list under a different name though.

Reply 6 of 12, by BurnedPinguin

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The drivers you listed are only ASPI managers, aka, the ones that I said that you need to use together with ASPIDISK.SYS to actually get USB mass storages found by the ASPI managers to show up as actual drives.

Reply 7 of 12, by BurnedPinguin

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As an addendum, the only sort of downside to this method I envision is Adaptec's ASPIDISK.SYS not telling you the drive letter of the drive it just mounted. I'll be looking for similar alternatives to ASPIDISK.SYS, but specifically avoiding the ones made for USB drives as I have tried those in the past.

Reply 8 of 12, by BurnedPinguin

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Here's another "EHCI" ASPI driver I found, seems to be part of the Iomega series...

Attachments

  • Filename
    ASPIEHCI.SYS.zip
    File size
    16.87 KiB
    Downloads
    115 downloads
    File license
    Public domain

Reply 9 of 12, by Damian9303

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NOVAC.SYS in this package seems to be the same as DI1000DD.SYS, which initializes any removable devices just like how ASPIDISK.SYS aims to do. UHCIOHCI.SYS seems to be the right driver that actually communicates with the controller to find any USB devices that have been inserted. To make notice, “NOVAC.SYS” as this package calls it never worked right for me and I’d rather use NJ32DISK.SYS which seems to accomplish its end-goal right.

Reply 11 of 12, by BurnedPinguin

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well,

device=(one of the drivers).sys
device=aspidisk.sys

the drivers don't require switches in my experience, they do have them for forcing some modes but I haven't found myself needing that, just pick what driver works, most of them should, but start with panasonic, then try the other ones if that doesn't work

Reply 12 of 12, by Alistar1776

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BurnedPinguin wrote on 2023-01-08, 16:07:
well, […]
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well,

device=(one of the drivers).sys
device=aspidisk.sys

the drivers don't require switches in my experience, they do have them for forcing some modes but I haven't found myself needing that, just pick what driver works, most of them should, but start with panasonic, then try the other ones if that doesn't work

oh, ok. thanks

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