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scsi setup questions

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linemanduke

Veteran Member
Joined
Mar 22, 2006
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517
Location
marietta georgia
i have a future domain tmc-840 scsi card ive been kicking around for a few years, and i have just bought a external hard drive enclosure that has a quantum 210s drive in it. i want to put it on my Compaq portable or my pc xt but have no idea how to do any thing that's not plug and play :p. also there is a good chance this drive is mac formatted will i have to do anything to fix that?
 
Have a read here first:
http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/showthread.php?t=9992

Does the card have a BIOS? Other than the obvious Eprom sitting on the card you can plug it in and see if it shows up on the screen during boot.
Without a BIOS you cannot hard boot from the drive.

You will need to high-level format the disk drive anyway - previous format doesn't matter. But, if the external enclosure is from a Mac with a 25-pin connector *don't* plug it in to the card until you have sorted out the electrical compatibility.

Got any drivers with the card?
 
oh no bios which might be a good thing since i don't want to boot from the drive
still want to boot to the original drives as this drive is external
 
So all you'll need is a driver and a format utility. The biggest pitfalls are the on the hardware side. Safest to use the internal 50-pin ribbon cable to the disk, taking care to get the pin 1's matched. A terminator required at each end of course.

If you use the 25-pin external connection do your research before plugging anything in. There was a well-know conflict between Apple and Future Domain's use of the DB25 which resulted in a short circuit, if I recall correctly.
 
The best driver for use with future domain tmc 8xx without bios is powerscsi 4.1 drivers from adaptec.

I use it with my fd850mex and I have hdsupport and external cdrom support.

The only problem is that this drivers use near 100kb of ram, and take about 2 minutes in booting all the drivers.

Is a short prize for have cdrom and hd in a xt...........iu know???

http://www.adaptec.com/en-US/speed/obsolete/future_domain-trantor/pwrscsi4_exe.htm

Try it and tell us the results, if you can make photos better.

Regards.
 
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