You need the adaptec drivers. It's called aspicd.sys or so.
Can you ping me in 7 hours or so and I can upload them for you (I still have my old dos 6.22/scsi setup on an image and just yestrday looked that part up to help mr.bigmouth with his mscdex problem). You will still need to defeat catch 22 😉
Perhaps a friend or anyone that can put it on a floppy?

Ok.

I got ASPICD.SYS from here:
http://www.hiren.info/downloads/dos-files

I moved it to C:\DOS and have edited the files.

CONFIG.SYS:
DEVICE=C:\DOS\ASPICD.SYS /D:ASPICD01

AUTOEXEC.BAT:
C:\DOS\MSCDEX /D:ASPICD01 /L:G

...I get an error that ASPICD01 not found, no valid device driver present. This is with an Adaptec AHA-1542 with a Toshiba 6201 (or similar model #) 32x drive, internal.

Any ideas? Thanks.

bp

I think you need to load the SCSI card driver first. In my case it was ASPI8DOS.SYS - can't remember whcih card I had back then, perhaps exactly that one...

My old config.sys had this:
DEVICE=C:\PROGRAMS\SCSI\ASPI8DOS.SYS /D
DEVICE=C:\PROGRAMS\SCSI\ASPICD.SYS /D:MSCD1_2

my autoexec.bat:
C:\DOS\MSCDEX.EXE /E /D:MSCD1_2 /M:4

So, yes, pretty sure you needed the card driver loaded first.

I matched my scripts to yours, got the proper driver - getting this error.

Oy. Ideas?

bp

Be sure that the DIP switch resource setting complies with the defaults the driver uses - or give the correct parameters.
To quote the readme that comes with the ASPI disk:

ASPI4DOS.SYS ------------ […]
Show full quote

ASPI4DOS.SYS
------------

ASPI4DOS.SYS is Adaptec's ASPI manager for the AHA-1540 and AHA-1640 host adapters

o For the AHA-1540C/CF/CP host adapters, the port address is set by the DIP switches.
The IRQ and DMA channel are set in the SCSISelect utility. The default is I/O port
330h, IRQ 11, and DMA 5.

o If the I/O port range is changed from the default of 330h, the selected port must
be added to the ASPI4DOS.SYS driver line with the parameter /Pxxx (x=the 3 digit
I/O port range selected via the DIP switch and displayed in SCSISelect)

ftp://ftp.brain.it/public/Driver/Adaptec/Dos% … tati/README.TXT

The SCSISelect Utility can be reached by pressing CTRL-A on boot detection and it displays the settings.

With defaults:

All those settings are standard. That is not the problem.

What could the problem be?

bp

Some soundcards may set their MPU-401 interface to 330h, which may conflict with the SCSI card's default setting. Check that before proceeding. Your setup should be as follows

CONFIG.SYS:
DEVICE=C:\DRIVER\ASPI4DOS.SYS
DEVICE=C:\DRIVER\ASPICD.SYS /D:ASPICD01

Another thing to try would be the Windows 98SE boot disk. It loads the ASPI drivers and CD-ROM support on boot.

AUTOEXEC.BAT:
C:\DOS\MSCDEX.EXE /D:ASPICD01

assuming the ASPI driver loads, you should have a working CD-ROM drive.

I'd be interested to know how SCSI CD-ROM drives go with some of the picky CD games like Wing Commander III, Descent II and the Pinball games. Especially all the CDDA tracks.

I remember having problems with WC3 but I was able to play through and it wasn't necessarily a problem with scsi but the drive. Can't remember which drive it was, though... 😉

I don't remember those games specifically picky about the CD-ROM. I had WC IV running on a rather common setup of Adaptec 2940UW + Plextor PX-40TS and there were no problems at all. Actually I think that with SCSI most of the games work out-of-the-box since the whole back end uses DMA by default. This was always an additional effort to setup correctly with ATAPI (tricd.sys f.e. for Triton chipsets).

Correct CDDA handling is more an issue of the drive than of the interface.

And the drive 😀

Newer drives don't have all the features implemented in the firmware. Things such as being able to control the CDDA volume.

So I want to install DamnSmallLinux (DSL) on this system and it needs to boot from the CD-ROM drive. The Adaptec SCSISelect menu settings have an option to enable boot from CD-ROM. It's enabled, but I'm not seeing booting from the attached CD-ROM drive. HD is SCSID 1, CD-ROM is SCSIID 4.

I am running this in an ASUS PVI-486SP3 where I have disabled the onboard IDE.

_Can_ I get auto boot from this card on this motherboard? Thanks.

bp

Yes, the CD-ROM booting function is part of the SCSI card's ROM and independent of the motherboard (assuming the revision is new enough to support El Torito). Is SCSISelect seeing the drive? It should show up on the list of devices when it scans the bus.

Yep, confirmed it has 2.10 BIOS with El Torito support. It sees the drive fine normally, and it spins during recognition at boot, but it does not boot from the CD.

http://distro.ibiblio.org/damnsmall/release_candidate/
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/download.html

Any other suggestions? Thanks.

bp

http://www.minuszerodegrees.net/manuals/Adapt … ion%20Guide.pdf
https://storage.microsemi.com/en-us/support/_ … raccess_doc.htm

are all the AHA- models bootable?
and all the AVA- models non-bootable? is that correct?