First post, by Thallanor
I have an 8-bit ISA Trantor T-128 SCSI card that works and boots with a 49 MB Seagate ST-157N SCSI hard drive. I was able to boot from a DOS floppy, fdisk it without any drivers or anything, though I did note it only saw it as an 18 MB drive and partitioned it as such, and then I could format it, boot from it, etc.
But I wanted to go solid state, so I waited for the SCSI2SD v6 to be in stock again, and then nabbed one. (The v5 and v5.1 are often in stock but the v6 uses a different chipset, is a bit faster, allows you to connect USB to it to read and write to the SD from another computer, etc. so I held out until the v6 was in stock.)
The issue that I am now running into is that fdisk doesn't see the SCSI2SD at all. It simply reports that no fixed drives were found. When I run the SCSITEST.EXE from the red 5.25" NEC floppy that came with the Trantor, it does see it there, but fdisk refuses to. I'm wondering if using Trantor's low-level format utility, TFORMAT, might allow me to get this working, but my floppy disc doesn't contain this program. (I suspect as this card seems to be mostly packaged along with an NEC CD-ROM drive.) I've found SCSIWorks! (I think v1.3) that comes with TFORMAT, but it's v2.02 and when I run it, it can't see my Trantor controller and throws an error to that effect. There has been some speculation elsewhere that perhaps an older version (1.x?) of TFORMAT might see the controller, but I have no idea.
I'm wondering if anyone might have some suggestions, as I'm running out of options. I was wondering if maybe there was a "generic" low level format utility for DOS that might see the SCSI adapter, or if ASPI or something was an option (but even with ASPI, I'm struggling to get it to work with finding the appropriate drivers for the T-128, etc.) I have not dabbled in SCSI since the late 90s and while I set it up and used it a lot back then, my memory is crap. I'm running out of options and just don't know how to proceed.
This is all going into a Tandy 1000 TL/2 which I've seen working with the Trantor (the super multimedia TL/2 elsewhere in the forums originally used it, before he went with a Rancho 8-bit ISA SCSI card). I don't have many options apart from getting a SCSI to PCMCIA adapter and a CF card and hoping that works, but I'm afraid I might end up dumping good money onto bad going this route, and I'd rather not buy anything else unless I know 100% it is going to work (admittedly, nothing is certain, so let's say mostly certain it will work 😀 ).
Adaptec's support site still has some files for these old cards, but it's fragmented. Like for my card, I can find documentation as a download, but not actual files, but if you tweak the model a bit, I can find some things that work. Also, they seem to have a section for T128 as well as T-128 - each with different files. Just so confusing. If I could find a version of TFORMAT that would work with the T-128, that might help. But I have no idea where to start anymore. 🙁