From: afdenis@lims02.lerc.nasa.gov (Stephen Dennison)
Subject: SKUZZY drives driving me bonkers.... any suggestions ?
News-Software: VAX/VMS VNEWS 1.41    
Organization: Ancient Souls Inc.
Date: 31 Aug 1992 14:10 EST  

Since the only *useful* help I have gotten re: my CD-ROM drives and Adaptec 
SCSI Host Adapter has been from this group, I'm going to the well one more 
time. I hope I don't wear out my welcome here.

Once again, I come to the net hat in hand begging for assistance, and *no*, 
I didn't misspell SCSI in the subject line ... SKUZZY is the way I feel 
about them right now. I spent probably 3-4 hours on the technical 
assistance hotline with Adaptec, an inderterminate time *holding* for 
assistance from Sony, and am pretty much fed up with the whole thing at the 
moment. Ever the bulldog, however, I will describe my setup and give you 
guys one more shot at it before I use my CDU-541's for a boat anchor and try 
to skip my Adaptec host adaptor across Lake Erie to Canada.

Here is the system ... a Gateway 2000 386/33 Mhz with a 2 floppy/2 HD IDE 
interface in place and one IDE hard drive connected to it. I am trying to 
get an Adaptec 1522 adapter to talk to 2 Sony CD Rom Drives (CDU-541's) 
that have been cabled together and mounted into an external box with a 
power supply. The drives are cabled together (in series) via a 50 pin 
ribbon cable and terminate (externally) in  2 50 Pin D-shell (Centronics-
Type) connectors. One of those connectors cables to the Adaptec card and 
the other is terminated by a 50 Pin D-Shell terminating block. A thumb-wheel 
type arrangement has been connected to the SONY drives where *jumpers* would 
normally be used to configure the drives as device 0,1,2,3, etc ...

Anyway, as per *your* suggestions, I have disabled the Adaptec's on board 
Bios, (also the `boot' section and the floppy drive controller), configured 
the CD-ROMS as devices 2 and 3 (using those thumbwheels which I am not at 
*all* convinced are cabled properly), loaded the apsi2dos.sys driver, the 
sony_cd.sys driver, and the MSCDEX.EXE driver, and tried to boot the devices. 

In the above configuration (with Adaptec's verbose messages enabled), the 
host adapter establishes communications with one of the drives, but reports 
it as "Target 5:	SONY	CDU-541" and when I try to load the sony 
driver next, it reports that neiter device is a CD-ROM Drive.

Changing those thumbwheels to read 0 and  1 allows the Adaptec card to see 
both drives when the apsi2dos driver loads, but it reports...

"Target 0:	SONY	CDU-541"
"Target 5:	SONY	CDU-541"

..and the Sony driver *still* reports neither device as a CD-Rom drive.

Needless to say,  MSCDEX.EXE loads in *any* case, but the D: and E: drives 
that it sets up are inaccessable.

Possible (guesses) solutions ...

1) The thumbwheels were incorrectly cabled and the settings (device 0, 1, 2 , 
   3 , 4 etc.) are not what is actually being fed to the Adaptec

2) The D-Shell terminator block on the *outside* of the 2-drive box is not 
   doing the same thing as the internal terminator blocks (supplied with the 
   SONY drives) do.

3) The CD-ROM drives are defective.

Has *anybody* else had similar experiences with trying to get these devices 
to talk ? Does the MSCDEX.EXE file in the Adaptec software kit (which I 
didn't purchase because the software I am trying to use these CD-ROMS with 
*came* with a MSCDEX.EXE driver) differ in some way from the MSCDEX.EXE 
that I *am* using ? 

I have used the *internal* cable that came with the Adaptec host adapter 
but got pretty much the same results. 

Soon it will be boat anchor time... lemme know if there is a solution to 
these difficulties out there in net.land and Lake Erie will be spared the 
additional pollution. God knows, the beaches around here are SKUZZY enough 
without the drives and adapter. :-)

Oh, and thanks to all who responded to my initial question... you were all 
correct and you beat Adaptec to the response by *days* ! 


-- Stephen

	"Some people live their dreams, some people close their eyes.
	 Some people's destiny... passes by"

					"I'll Be Over You"   -- Toto

Newsgroups: comp.periphs