Conference noted::ibmpc-95

        I just install a 1542A full size board in my system and would like
    to disable the board from trying to boot a hard drive. I use it to 
    run the CD-Rom now. No hard drive.  There are no switches. Just pins.
    Note ...  The board sates it a 1542A. The controller chip on top is
    marked 1540A.   Does anyone know what pin/s to change?

    Thanks  Bob

    www.adaptec.com has PDF format manuals for all their controllers. looks
    for the BIOS-Disable pins and set them.
    
    mark

and make sure it is set to the secondary address ....

    Adaptec info does not go back that far. They have info on the 154x 
    B,C,CF and more, but no " A "  . I still need to know what pins /
    jumpers to move.  
    
    Thanks  Bob
    

    On a 1520/1522 the jumper is marked 'BT' (no jumper=no boot). Maybe
    it's the same for the 1542A (just a guess).

    I have a PC with a Seagate ST01 controlling a 400 Mb SCSI drive.
    When I replace the ST01 with a 1540B and start the machine, the
    Adaptec BIOS identifies itself and tells me it finds a disk	at
    id 0 lun 0, which is correct. It subsequently fails when trying
    to boot from the disk with the message: failed to find operating
    system, or something of that nature.
    When I boot off a floppy the disk is seen and can be used
    normally. I did not reformat the drive with the 1504B.
    When I put back the ST01 the system boots happily off the same
    disk.
    What am I doing wrong? Should I reformat? DOS or low-level?
    
    BTW, the card is set to DMA channel 5, IRQ 11, DMA speed 5.0Mb,
    DREQ channel 5, DACK channel 5, IRQ channel 11, BIOS enable,
    port address 330h, 0 wait state, BIOS address C8000h.
    The bus is terminated to the outside with one of those big
    terminators you find on our equipment. The internal cable is
    terminated too, but I did not take out the terminator packs
    of the adapter, figuring that if it does see the disk (and can
    access it when I boot off a floppy) it should be OK.
    Should I take those packs out?
    
    Rien.                                    
    

    I had the same problem a while back. Even though I was able to read the
    drive using the Adaptec, it would not boot. The only solution was to
    run FDISK, remove the existing partition, create a new partition then
    reformat. Apparantly the Seagate controller maps the drive differently
    than the Adaptec.
    
    /Rich

    Thanks, I'll give it a try.
    
    Rien.
    

    re: .-1
    
    That was it. Repartitioned, reformatted, it works!
    Thanks.
    
    Rien.
    

Following along in another note about SCSI disks and lights, while I was 
inside my case this weekend I wanted to see if I could get the the DISK light
to light up when there was disk activity.  The install guide for my 
2940 shows an optional step of connecting the LED leads "from the motherboard"
to the SCSI card.  

I tried it with no luck:

1) my LED leads come from the front of the case (an Enlight case), not the 
   motherboard (a Tyan Tomcat IIId).
2) The leads have only two connections but the installation instructions 
   say which pins to use for this configuration.

The only thing I can think of is these leads do not supply power to 
light up the LED so its never going to go on (ie that is what the other
two (of four) pins are for on the SCSI card.

Anyway, has anyone hooked up those leads on a 2940 ?

bjm

    Yep. Even on a Tomcat 1.
    
    The LED leads from the case connect to the 2940 connector. Connect it
    to 2 of the 4 pins, making sure one of the pins is an edge pin. If it
    works, fine. If not, invert the connector and reconnect, then it will
    work.
    
    It's hard to get a whole lot easier....
    
    Chris
    

I have an AHA-2940 with the HDD Led hooked up.  My case has a pair of 
wires with a connector at the end labeled HDD.  I connected it to the 
2940 and now the disk light turns on whenever there is SCSI disk 
activity on the system.

>>    It's hard to get a whole lot easier....

That's what I thought.

>>    works, fine. If not, invert the connector and reconnect, then it will
>>    work.

Invert?  Hmm, its just a silly light bulb right?  Does it matter?  I'll try 
it but why it should matter does not make sense to me.

I'll also try the other two pins.

Since my MB does not support Turbo mode, I've got a spare LED to play with 
too :-)

bjm

    It's a LED, not an incandescent bulb. Polarity matters...
    
    Chris
    

>>    It's a LED, not an incandescent bulb. Polarity matters...

O-tay.  I guess I lucked out on the power-on LED then :-)

bjm

Turning the connector over did the trick.  I now have yet another flickering
light :-)

thanks

    You probably miss 11/70s too, don't you?
    
    - M

No.

I miss KA-10s (and, for lights, KI-10s)

I was one of the KI-10 designers. I used to be able to diagnose CPU
problems from the lights alone. I was always amazed that the machine
didn't crash when I pushed the lamp-test button. You could feel the
heat on your face when all those lamps lit up.

We had to hassle the mechanical designers to make it so you could
replace a burnt out lamp without tools. The lights were expensive
(lamps, sockets, drivers, wiring, power supply, transparent panels, etc.)
so they had to go when computer prices dropped.

Dave

    I think Osram may have been our supplier of low voltage lamps
    then. I recall everything I ever worked on (PDP-8's, PDP-11's
    etc.) all used incandescent lamps made by a couple of Japanese
    vendors such as Osram. When LED's started to become available,
    and finally replaced incandescent indicators, power supply 
    engineers started to see the possibility to design
    smaller and lower wattage power supplies.
    
    Bob

    When I worked at ITT World Communications, one of the things we did to
    bring PDP-15s up to our specification was to replace the incandescent
    lamps on the console with LEDs.  There was a company in California that
    made pin-compatible units for us (they are still in business, by the
    way, making LED replacements for incandescents).  We also had to "dill
    out" the blue filters in the XVM systems so the lights could be seen.
    These systems ran really, trully non-stop applications, and the
    technitians really made use of the lights if something went wrong. 
    When we had Imperial Technology build memory disk emulators for the
    RS09/RF15 fixed head disks, the operations staff insisted that it have
    light registers so they could diagnose problems.  It was built with one
    row of LEDs and a rotary switch to select the internal register.
    
    We amused a DEC Field Engineer once, who was doing PE on our PDP-11
    and, among other things was supposed to replace burned out lamps on an
    RK05 that you needed a special lamp puller to reach.  We had him put in
    some of our LEDs instead, so we would never have burned out indicator
    lights again.  We also ended up putting LEDs into our Memorex 677 Disk
    drives (and Digital's re-branded RP06s).
    
    There were times when those lights really came in useful.  I would
    still like to have working disk activity lights.

    In 1980, I managed a system that, according to the DEC field service
    guy, was the only one of two remaining systems in the Washington DC
    area that had RPR02 disk drives (they couldn't tell me who else had
    them - it was classified).  
    
    These were 9-12 platter removables (pre-winchester - I remember
    thinking when winchesters came out "Gee!  If the disk goes bad, you
    have to replace the whole DRIVE???  Stooopid"), and probably held 2.5 -
    5 MEG - tops.  Each one was larger than a washing machine, and did a
    better dance.
    
    But what really made them spectacular was the *hand-wired* disk
    controller, that easily had over 100 marker lights, indicating every
    possible metric concerning the motion of the heads and the status of
    the drives.  I remember going in the computer room, turning out the
    lights, and watching a compile.  It was awesome.
    
    jeb
    
    (P.S.  This system was also unique in other ways.  It was a PDP 11/34
    with 256K CORE memory, a full console, and was marketed as a DEC Data
    System.  This meantit came in gold, instead of purple and maroon).
    

RP02:

10 platters, 20 surfaces, 200 cylinders, 10 sectors per track, if memory
serves me correctly.  Formatted for a -10, 40,000 "blocks" of 4608 data
bits (or 576 of what we now call bytes) each.  That made it about a 20MB
drive.  (Well, we used to say 25MB unformatted...)

Re: KI-10:

Thanks to whoever made the lights replacable.  I helped someone do a couple
of bays on a KA once, and the difference going to the KI was incredible.

I used to use the lights on a KI to find my way out of the dark computer
room, after I'd turned the overhead lights out.  I'd grope my way to a
terminal, type some command like "SYSTAT," and use the light it provided to
find my way out of the room.

I actually used the lights on the whole system for both debugging (using
the blur of the lights to chase down an open async line or watching the PI
channels to see what I/O activity there was) and for performance tuning of
applications.  (My goal was to turn the "AM Any Match" on as bright as
possible, and shut the "Idle" lights off on on the disk controllers and
data channels.)

    The RP02 and RPR02 were different... RPR02 was a refurbished drive of
    different manufacture than RP02, and loud like hell, and you really had
    to nail them on the floor to prevent them from just walking away...
    

Re: .399
> Thanks to whoever made the lights replacable.

I'd give credit to Alan Kotok, now retired from Digital but working
for another company. He pushed hard for the lamp sockets, swing-down
panels, and lamp-test button.

Dave

    Ah, Alan Kotok.
    
    One of my heroes.

re.>The RP02 and RPR02 were different... RPR02 was a refurbished drive of
    different manufacture than RP02, and loud like hell, and you really had
    to nail them on the floor to prevent them from just walking away...

The RPR02 was a Memorex (SP?) - remember them well...

-Bill

    RP02 was also Memorex.  (RP01, RP02 Memorex, RP03, RP04 ISS, RP05, RP06
    Memorex, RP07 ISS - ya think they'd have learned sooner or later)

    Wow! RP02's etc. When I worked in CSS light years ago, I worked
    with an engineer and we designed a special PDP-11 flip-chip interface
    to an RP02. It consisted of roughly a 17"x26" backplane loaded with
    M-series flip-chip modules. The backplane was a nightmare to work
    on. In debugging it, we found more bottom level wraps that were
    shorted out to something it wasn't supposed to be connected to.
    It seems at the time the wire-wrap plant (kanata) had just changed
    some of their wiring algorithms, and our backplane was one of
    the many guinea-pigs for their process.
    The drive was as others have said, noisy, and had to be leveled
    well to keep it from walking across the lab floor....especially
    when doing home seeks. The whole drive would move a few inches every
    time this was done. Unfortunately, we had some logic problems in the
    area that controlled the head seek operation, and for the first
    few days of debug, we were constantly pushing the drive back to its
    desired position on the floor next to our bench. We finally got smart
    and disconnected the power cable to the head coil. The permanent
    magnet inside that puppy was huge too. Get anything magnetic close
    to it and you had to fight to get it off the magnet.
    
    Bob

    We contracted with a media maintenance firm.  This guy came in every
    few months, CLEANED the magnetic surfaces of the drives to remove dirt
    and debris, and used an interesting tool to inspect all the surfaces
    for touchdowns.  After touchdowns (they weren't called head crashes
    unless the bounce led to an oscillation and destroyed the head), he'd
    let me know which disks had developed new bad spots and needed to be
    diagnosed with BAD (the bad block finder utility).
    
    The heads were replaced annually, since they wore down quite a bit from
    constantly hitting the disk surfaces.
    
    If I didn't mention it before, the power supplies burned out every one
    to two years, so the field service guy kept spares in a cabinet outside
    the computer room.  We went through them like you go through floppy
    disks nowadays.
    
    BTW, in addition to an 800 BPI tape drive, this system also had a
    punched card reader (026 as I recall, but I'm not sure about that).
    The next PDP I worked on had a paper tape punch.  
    
    And I have a (customized) copy of TREK on 8" floppy, that runs under
    MUBASIC under RT-11, if you need a copy.
    
    Should I feel old, or just privileged?  :-)
    
    jeb
    

    I picked up a couple of Adaptec PCI SCSI controllers recently:
    
    A2940UW	Adaptec 2940UW w/kit/Wide SCSI cable 215.00
    A2940U	Adaptec 2940U  w/kit/Wide SCSI cable 188.00
    
    I bought the Ultra Wide for a pair of Seagate 'Cudas.  I picked
    up the 2940U when I found out the adapter cable for 68-pin to
    50-pin was $100.  I'll keep my internal 8-bit devices on the
    narrow controller and use the 8-bit external connector.

>>    up the 2940U when I found out the adapter cable for 68-pin to
>>    50-pin was $100.  I'll keep my internal 8-bit devices on the

When I was figuring out which one to go with, this was mentioned a few times.
I know going with SCSI devices was going to be more expensive but I didn't 
need the added expense of that adapter cable!

bjm

Out of a scrap pile we turned up a 1540B and were thinking of putting it
to work.  It is now in a system but during boot process the bios prints
out
          SYSTEM CONFIGURATION ERROR
I have two CD-ROMs hooked to it with ids 4 and 5.  My guess is the bios 
is looking for a disk to boot from.  The system goes ahead and boots 
(from another controller like I want) and runs fine.  Both CD-ROMs are
visible and useable.  Looking at the jumpers it appears to be possible
to disable the bios which would obviously disable booting.  Unfortunately
this makes it impossible for Linux to recognize the drive.  Is it 
possible to go half way and just disable booting?  

Chris

    re: .409 by ANGST::legoe.zko.dec.com::angst.zko.dec.com::marshall
    
    Chris,
    
    I can't believe Linux won't be able to use the 1540B if the bios is
    disabled.  You're booting off a different controller so all that's
    needed is a driver for the 1540B.
    
    SYSTEM CONFIGURATION ERROR sounds more serious than the simple lack of
    hard drives on that host adapter.  It may be the bios that's
    conflicting with something else.
    
    If you need the 1540B jumper settings, I found a handy place for that
    info is in the NT adapter help files.  (might be from the NT resource
    kit; I forget...)
    
    /Bill

re .410

Bill,
    It is possible to get Linux to work with Adaptec controllers
without bios but it is a pain and prone to error.  I have a Sound 
Blaster 16 with the SCSI-II interface which is essentially a card 
with both a Sound Blaster and an Adaptec controller without bios.
It takes setting a bunch of special parameters to get it to work.
    Anyway I checked for conflicts in the settings and could not
find any.

cheers,
Chris 

You've got the source, just comment out the BIOS check code.  I had to do this to 
get Linux to use an FD-800 without BIOS.

Do to the system hangs when I wanted to restart Windows 95 (as discussed
elsewhere in this notes file or in GIADEV::DECSTATION) I recently got rid of my
NCR/Symbios 810-based ASUS SC-200 and purchased a AHA2940AU - the narrow Ultra
variant of the 2940 family.

It cured my problem - but bought me another, more serious one. I can't use my
SCSI disks from DOS.

Here's my configuration: 

Venturis FP590
840 MB  EIDE disk with a primary (FAT) partition C and an extended partition
    with logical drive D (FAT) and a NTFS partition (not seen from DOS; drive
    letter W when running Windows NT)
2 RZ25 disks (406 MB each), with two FAT partitions on each (E, F, G, and H)
external Toshiba SCSI CD-ROM (drive letter S)
(other devices connected when needed, e.g. tape, scanner)

I 'removed' the SC-200 from Win95 and Windows NT 3.51 configurations, and
removed the Symbios drivers from CONFIG.SYS of my DOS configuration. I then
swapped the adapter and installed the EZSCSI software for all three platforms.
I did change nothing on the SCSI bus (device IDs, termination etc) except the
controller board.

I left the Adaptec BIOS active despite booting from the EIDE drive, because I
though I wouldn't require ASPIDISK.SYS in this case.

The new setup worked fine for both Windows 95 and Windows NT; but when I boot
DOS 6.22 it can see the CD-ROM drive, but not the disks.

The BIOS does see the disks, it correctly reports the two DEC RZ25 drives and
the Toshiba CD-ROM drive. The only strange thing is that it reports the first
RZ25 with drive letter D: (which is already in use for the first logical drive
on the EIDE disk). I also get the message that the BIOS has been successfully
installed.

When ASPI8DOS.SYS gets loaded in CONFIG.SYS, it complains about 'an old version
of EMM386' which may lead to hangs on some PCs. One of the suggested solutions
is to use EMM386 from DOS 6.22 or later - which it definitely is !  The
timestamp on my EMM386 file clearly says 6:22. Any idea what the reason for this
message could be ?

When in DOS, only the two partitions C and D on the EIDE disk and the CD-ROM
drive are seen. When I try to change the current drive letter to E, F, G, or H,
DOS tells me that there is no such drive.

I also tried to load ASPIDISK.SYS in CONFIG.SYS right after ASPI8DOS.SYS, but
this driver reported that it could not find any devices to work with and that it
would not load for this reason.

Any suggestions what I could try to get my disks working under DOS ?

Thanks for all and any help,
Hans.

While I tried a few more things, I've come to the conclusion that this might be
a Venturis specific problem and have reposted this problem in the
GIADEV::DECSTATION notesfile as topic 7434.

If you have any ideas how to solve this problem, please reply over there to keep
the discussion in a single place.

Thanks,
Hans.

I installed an HP 6020 CD Writer in my 450ST tower over the weekend.

The MSCDEX that I'm running came with my TEAC tape drive, and is
probably three years old. The ASPI software that I'm running came with
the ADAPTEC 1740. I looked at the dates of the drivers and was surprised
to see that they all show dates around 1991! 

The CD Writer shows up in Windows (it's T:).

The first time I click on the CD Writer icon, the drive spins up, reads
the CD that's in there, and the system comes back and says there is no
disk in the drive. If I click again, I can hang -- and sometimes crash
Windows. Someone told me this is to be expected, possibly because I
have an old MSCDEX, but he doesn't recall for sure.  Does this sound
familiar?

The same person said I should be able to _write_ a CD right now, though.
(I haven't tried yet.)

Is there an updated MSCDEX - and/or ASPI software that I should have? 

I'm running the ASPIDOS software that allowed me to install my third hard
drive. I also have a SCSI CDROM (SONY 2x)  (S:) in the system.


Art

    
    My mscdex.exe shows as 25361 in bytes dated 5/31/94 (DOS 6.22
    installation here on a 450ST at work). mscdex.exe in win95\command
    directory shows 25473 bytes dated 7/11/95. What version of DOS are you
    running? I'd update if it is older than 6.2/6.22! Is this under W95 and
    did you have a previous version of windows? What OS are you running?
    
    Mike
    

<sheepish look on>

DOS 6.0 (zero). I just upgraded from 5.0 this weekend, in preparation for
installing the CD Writer. 

I think I can get the upgrade from 6.0 to 6.22 from the web. Is that a
valid assumption?

<sheepish look fades very slowly>

    ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/peropsys/msdos/public/msdos622/STEPUP/ENGLISH/
    
    will get you the "stepup" kit to get to 6.22 (2492KB)
    
    /dave

Thanks, /dave. I pulled the stepup kit yesterday, and last night I
upgraded DOS to 6.22, and upgraded the MSCDEX to 2.23 (1995 vintage).

I also installed the Adaptec EZ-CD Pro software that arrived in my
mailbox yesterday. This software appears to do just about anything with
the CD Writer, including audio with and without WAV files.  My head is
now spinning with facts about the Red Book, the Yellow Book, the Orange
Book, and the Green Book.

But I still cannot access a disk in my CD Writer drive. At least this
software handles the errors better, and gives me more information.

The nature of my problem seems to match a section in the Troubleshooting
section of the HP 6020 manual where it says "Your DMA data speed may be
greater than 3mb/sec. Slow the DMA data rate to 3mb or less."

My Adaptec 1740 is running in Enhanced Mode, and since I never changed
the default DMA speed, it's apparently set to 5mb (which I was told is
the default). I'll try changing that tonight via the SCU.

It might be significant to note that the HP 6020 manual advises that the
"CD Writer was extensively tested with (here follows a list of Adaptec
driver boards which does _not_ include the 1740)."

Art
(having fun)

The educational experience continues. The default DMA speed for all
devices on the Adaptec 1740 is 10Mhz. I set address 4 (the CD-Writer) to
the minimum speed, 3.3 Mhz, and it did not help.

I've send email to Adaptec and HP...

Art