This is a bit more of a mini-rant at the rather abhorrent state and experiences I've had with the real mode drivers for Adaptec's older, non-PCI cards. Comments/suggestions are of course welcomed, more wanting to share my experiences in hopes that maybe I can spare someone else this same pain.
Let's start out with the system in question's specs:
SCSI Drives connected externally (in order) on 1542CF:
Now the image I had made previously does work, which already had the ASPI8DOS.SYS driver (for the majority of Adaptec's PCI based cards). Those load just fine, the ASPICD.SYS driver loads fine, and after MSCDEX/SHSUCDX loads, the Plextor is given a drive letter and perfectly acessible. Thanks to enabling the option to "treat removable disks as fixed" enabled on the 1542CF, the magneto optical drive is fully usable in DOS, and the system boots completely as expected on the hard drive image.
My woes start when I try to load ASPI4DOS.SYS, the ASPI driver for the 1540 series and 1640 Microchannel cards. The driver DOES see the 1542CF, but it just....hangs until it times out reporting it can't load. Subsequently the ASPICD.SYS driver fails to load, then things go way off the rails and even the hard drive stops responding/system halts.
I *suspect* it's an IRQ conflict, but still need to test more.
Let's start out with the system in question's specs:
- Super Micro P54VLPCI Motherboard
- Socket 5, 4 72-pin SIMM sockets, 2 VLB, 3 PCI, 2 ISA (excluding the VLB ones), 1 ISA/PCI
- Pentium 90 CPU
- Trident ISA video card
- Adaptec 1542CF ISA SCSI card (Floppy port enabled and connected)
- Adaptec 29160N PCI SCSI card
- Plextor 8x SCSI CDROM drive, Caddy load (shocked me too)
- ISA Super I/O card (floppy, IDE, and Serial Port 2 all disabled)
- Linksys LNE100TX PCI NIC
SCSI Drives connected externally (in order) on 1542CF:
- 128MB Magneto Optical Drive (termination disabled), ID 5
- BlueSCSI v1 with:
- 512MB HD image, ID 0
- ISO file used as CDROM, ID 6
- Plextor 8X CDROM (internal, on 50-pin Fast SCSI connector)
Now the image I had made previously does work, which already had the ASPI8DOS.SYS driver (for the majority of Adaptec's PCI based cards). Those load just fine, the ASPICD.SYS driver loads fine, and after MSCDEX/SHSUCDX loads, the Plextor is given a drive letter and perfectly acessible. Thanks to enabling the option to "treat removable disks as fixed" enabled on the 1542CF, the magneto optical drive is fully usable in DOS, and the system boots completely as expected on the hard drive image.
My woes start when I try to load ASPI4DOS.SYS, the ASPI driver for the 1540 series and 1640 Microchannel cards. The driver DOES see the 1542CF, but it just....hangs until it times out reporting it can't load. Subsequently the ASPICD.SYS driver fails to load, then things go way off the rails and even the hard drive stops responding/system halts.
I *suspect* it's an IRQ conflict, but still need to test more.