need some help setting up SCSI ZIP drive in DOS.

I finally tracked down one of those internal SCSI zip drives for my DOS 486 but I cant seem to get it to run, i'm assuming its cause its an SCSI so I'm wondering what I'm missing. my SCSI controller does see it on boot. the controllers ID is 7, my zip drives id is 5 and my SCSI hard drives id is 0. the hdd is the last device on the cable and is set to terminate. the terminator on the zip drive is off.

usually with my IDE drives its just a matter of running Guest.exe and the drive is seen, a letter is assigned and that's it but when I run Guest.exe for this drive the drive is not found. I'm hoping its just something i'm missing software wise like i'm missing a file or some such utility that's used specifically for the SCSI drives?

The simplest way is to find the ASPI driver for your SCSI card and add a generic ASPI disk driver on top of that. Works fine for me.

The IDE ZIP drive I offered you didn't present enough of a challenge, did it?

it came down to having both devices filled on the single onboard IDE cable and a SCSI card with 6 more device spots. figured scsi was faster as well. id consider adding another IDE controller but i'm sure that would create 10 more unexpected headaches.

on the plus side this 486 that I've been piecing together for years is almost complete. just need a Ultrasound (preferably an ACE) and it will be complete.

If the SCSI adapter can see it (which you indicated) then you are probably in reasonable shape.

Does your SCSI adapter have a Format or Verify routine that you can use from the BIOS? Adaptec controllers generally do. Running a verify operation on a known good working disk will let you confirm that your SCSI setup is not the problem. (I've had termination problems where the card was able to enumerate the device but not use it.)

Assuming your SCSI setup is correct use an ASPI driver for the card and ASPIHDRM or something similar to provide removable storage support for the Zip drive. ASPI is kind of nice; you won't get the Zip specific features like the ability to lock a disk but it should take less memory than the GUEST drivers.

mbbrutman said:

If the SCSI adapter can see it (which you indicated) then you are probably in reasonable shape.

Does your SCSI adapter have a Format or Verify routine that you can use from the BIOS? Adaptec controllers generally do. Running a verify operation on a known good working disk will let you confirm that your SCSI setup is not the problem. (I've had termination problems where the card was able to enumerate the device but not use it.)

Assuming your SCSI setup is correct use an ASPI driver for the card and ASPIHDRM or something similar to provide removable storage support for the Zip drive. ASPI is kind of nice; you won't get the Zip specific features like the ability to lock a disk but it should take less memory than the GUEST drivers.

Click to expand...

its a Buslogic VLB controller. not sure if it has something i can go into. when its booting it sees the hdd and then it specificly says Zip drive and all the other stuff when assigning device ID's or whatever that is it does on boot.

BT445S ? A fine controller for the day.

Find the ASPI driver for the card. ASPIHDRM is part of Adaptec EZSCSI - 4.0 is a good version to try to find it in.


Mike

So I dont need to use a specific bus logic driver? I can use that adaptec one? Did Iomega not release a general driver for thier SCSI drive or should guest.exe work?

Attached is what you need. BTDOSM.SYS is the ASPI Driver; the remainder should be obvious; BTMDISK is the generic ASPII driver and I believe BTFDISK is the partitioning utility.

I would recommend tracking down the Bus Logic ASPI drivers if you can. The Bus Logic DOS ASPI driver is called BTDOSM.SYS and should work with all Bus Logic cards. There is also BTMDISK.SYS which is needed for hard disks with SCSI IDs other than 0 or 1; I don't know if the Zip Drive would need this driver as well. GUEST.EXE is supposed to work with any ASPI driver.

Disclaimer: While I have done SCSI Zip drives before, my knowledge of Bus Logic cards is quite minimal and I am basing these comments off a readme file. http://ps-2.kev009.com/ohlandl/SCSI/buslogic_dosaspi_431c_readme.txt is an online document that matches what I recall. The website there (move up a level) lists a copy of the Bus Logic ASPI drivers but lacking a Bus Logic card I am unable to confirm if the drivers are correct.

krebizfan said:

I would recommend tracking down the Bus Logic ASPI drivers if you can. The Bus Logic DOS ASPI driver is called BTDOSM.SYS and should work with all Bus Logic cards. There is also BTMDISK.SYS which is needed for hard disks with SCSI IDs other than 0 or 1; I don't know if the Zip Drive would need this driver as well. GUEST.EXE is supposed to work with any ASPI driver.

Click to expand...

Look at the post above yours. Beat ya to it!

Chuck(G) said:

Attached is what you need. BTDOSM.SYS is the ASPI Driver; the remainder should be obvious; BTMDISK is the generic ASPII driver and I believe BTFDISK is the partitioning utility.

Click to expand...

at the risk of sounding really stupid....no. not obvious to me.

I have those files copied to my hdd so i can access them without issue. but i really am not sure what to do with them. I tried putting the BTDOSM.SYS file in the file with guest.exe and the other aspi files and tried running it again but nothing. i'm guessing I need to set it up in my confg and sys files but i'm not sure how to go about this. I found this page http://home.netcom.com/~deepone/zipjaz/dos.html but its assuming I have the tools that came with the ZIP drive disks which I do not.

You're going to need to learn how to use CONFIG.SYS ... that is a basic prerequisite for owning a DOS machine. The good news is that a Google search will provide plenty of information - days worth even.

Some background on ASPI:

Each SCSI card is unique and different. There is a different set of chips and low level commands for talking to each one. What ASPI does is make all SCSI cards look the same to higher level software so that the software does not have to be programmed for every possible unique SCSI card out there. Your BusLogic card has an ASPI driver (provided by Chuck) - add that to CONFIG.SYS, after reading a little bit about CONFIG.SYS.

The ASPI driver does not do anything by itself - it just provides a common look and feel for all SCSI cards that software can use. Next you need a storage device driver. That is what GUEST.EXE will load, or ASPIHDRM from Adaptec EZSCSI provides. The storage device driver will enable DOS to use any block oriented storage that you have connected to the card, which in this case will be your SCSI Zip drive. The BusLogic provided device driver (BTMDISK) does the same thing. There probably is a small difference in functions, but for basic uses any of them will work.

I tried that. my files are in C:\SCSI

I have this line in my .sys file

device=c:\scsi\btdosm.sys

on boot up it starts to load this then says "*host adapter not found"

NM, got it to work! for some reason the ASPI provided wasn't working. I found another possibly newer version of the driver and it detected and loaded up fine on boot. now guest.exe detects the drive no problem.

thanks for the help guys.

Much better ... Enjoy!

Congratulations! I randomly chose the file that I had in hopes that earliest = better. Apparently, it was too early for your card. Good to see that you found the right version.

Since this tidbit of knowledge seems to be sinking below general awareness, it's worth going over again.

To start with, SCSI packets and messages as sent to a device have been ANSI standards for a long time. So you don't need to know whose tape or disk drive you're attaching to; just that it's a disk or tape with certain capabilities.

That's great, but initially, every SCSI controller required its own drivers for every device type. This could be a real problem if the vendor didn't develop a driver, for example, for your particular roboticzied cigar lighter. So someone came up with a great idea--to introduce an intermediate driver to abstract the controller details into a standard interface, so that everyone needed only a single driver for each device type. Thus, I needed only one driver for my cigar lighter, regardless of whose controller I was using, so long as the controller vendor gave me that intermediate driver. A wonderful idea.

Adaptec came out with their version of the intermediate driver and called it ASPI (Adaptec SCSI Programming Interface). As time went on, other controller vendors came up with their own versions, so the "A" was changed from "Adaptec" to "Advanced", so that nobody got their feathers ruffled. It's so simple that often, a program can skip the need for a device-specific driver and simply use ASPI commands directly. ASPI exists in both 16 and 32-bit versions, but wasn't officially supported by the Windows NT family until quite late; Microsoft was promoting their own SPTI "SCSI pass-through interface"), apparently not wanting to be indebted to Adaptec.

Around the same time, DEC and Future Domain were promoting an alternative called CAM ("Common Access Method"), which really is a superset of ASPI and bears the imprimatur of an ANSI (X3T10) standard. Future Domain initially supplied only CAM for a lot of their controllers, but one could use yet another layer (ASPICAM.SYS) to convert ASPI calls to CAM (doing the reverse is more difficult as CAM covers a lot more ground).

So if you get a SCSI controller, it's prudent to find out if the thing has an ASPI or CAM driver also. With either of those, you're good to go with just about any device.

Tidbit: IDE/ATA tried to get a similar system going and called it "ATASPI". It survives in a few products, but pretty much has fallen by the wayside. Too bad--ASPI/CAM is a great concept.