From: jurlwin@gandalf.UMCS.Maine.EDU (Jeff Urlwin)
Subject: Re: Adaptec AHA-1542B and large SCSI questions
Organization: University of Maine, Department of Computer Science
Date: Mon, 21 Dec 1992 14:25:22 GMT

In article <1992Dec21.023248.9417@weyrich.UUCP> uunet.uu.net!weyrich!orville writes:
>In article <1992Dec14.234840.2630@mksol.dseg.ti.com> mccall@mksol.dseg.ti.com (fred j mccall 575-3539) writes:
>>In <1992Dec12.174722.407@weyrich.UUCP> orville%weyrich@uunet.uu.net (Orville R. Weyrich) writes:
>>
>>>I tried to use the Adaptec BBS and couldn't get through, so maybe the
>>>net can help....
>>
>>>I got an Adaptec AHA-1542B controller and want to use it with OS/2 2.0
>>>and a large SCSI disk. 
>
>Specifically, a Maxtor P1-17S 1.5 Gig Panther.
>
>>>My question is this: I have heard that SCSI disks larger than 1 Gb may
>>>not work properly without BIOS upgrades or special drivers. Is this true for
>>>OS/2? 
>
>>I don't know if this is a problem for OS/2 or not, but if it is there
>>is no fix for it.  The Adaptec PROM upgrade is for DOS ONLY.  The
>>drivers for OS/2 make assumptions about the head/platter translation
>>that the Adaptec controller is doing that would break if you updated
>>the PROMs.

Hmmm.  I was told that the upgrade would work with OS/2 drivers.  What
version do you have?  GA?  The latest (SP, or from Adaptect BBS) support
it suposedly.  I was told that the only problem with > 1 gig disks with
OS/2 is trying to boot from them (without the upgrade).

>
>Talk about being between a rock and a hard spot!
>
>I have been banging my head against a brick wall for the past two days trying
>to get the Adaptec 1542B and the Maxtor P1-17S to work together.
>
>What I have been trying to do is to set up boot manager for DOS 5.0,
>Xenix, OS/2 2.0, and OS/2 beta. I wanted to keep my two MFM drives as well as
>the new Maxtor SCSI drive. With one MFM drive installed and using the
>FD controller on the MFM WD-clone controller, and with the FD controller on
>the Adaptec SCSI drive disabled, I was able to get the OS/2 FDISK on the
>installation program to partition both the MFM and SCSI drive to use the
>disk manager (putting DOS and Xenix partions on my MFM drive and OS/2
>partitions on the SCSI drive).
>
>The first problem is that I lost 33% of my SCSI drive -- FDISK only sees
>the first 1 Gig of the 1.5 Gig formatted capacity. 
>
Now the other thing about your 1.5 gig disk (assuming that's the MANUFACTUROR
reported size).  I just got a 1.2 gig disk, which is REALLY less than
a "true" 1 gig disk, by the time you format it and use "computer" math
instead of the manufacturor math.  They seem to use 1,000,000 bytes
for a MegaByte, whereas the rest of the computer world uses 1,048,576
(1024*1024) bytes.  What I'm getting to, is that you may not be losing
as much as you think (if anything at all).  How many megabytes does FDISK
report on the drive?

Again, though, check your driver's date.  That may be important here.

>Some folks on the net told me that OS/2 would be able to deal with larger
>drives using device drivers built into OS/2. Were they mistaken or do they
>have a trick I don't know about?

According to adaptec, this shouldn't be a problem.

>
>Much more serious is the next problem that arose: when I tried to continue
>with the install, the HPFS format stage failed as follows: Everything starts
>out prety much as I expect, but the drive light only flickers on periodically.
>As the formatting progresses, the duty-cycle of the light gradually changes
>from mostly off to constantly on, and drive seek noises diminish in frequency
>to nothing. Eight hours later, the drive still hasn't finished formatting a 
>100 M primary partition.  This is reminiscent of a problem with the original
>GA that appeared with one of my RLL systems, but was not present in the
>first public beta code and which could be corrected by replacing the 
>IBM506.ADD driver. Unfortunately, my attempts to install the beta version
>had the same result. Is this a known problem and is there a new driver that
>I should be using?

Hmmm.  I just got my "1.2" gig disk and split it into 400 MB FAT and rest
(600+) to HPFS.  (Needed the FAT for DOS compatibility).  Anyway...the
FAT format seemed to take forever (1 hour+) while the HPFS format was done
in about 20 minutes...(times are NOT accurate, but the relative times
are close).

>If I disable both of my MFM drives, then the install seems to work [I'm
>on disk 4 of the GA version now]. But while this convinces me that the 
>problem is not with my SCSI controller or SCSI drive, it is not a satifactory
>situation for several reasons.
>
>First of all, I need a non-SCSI partition to install Xenix on, and I want
>to be able to boot DOS and 3 different versions of OS/2, which I can't do
>with only a single SCSI drive.

Hmm..never tried this, but I do have bootmanager pointing to 3 different
OSs (Dos 5, Os/2 2.0 regular, OS/2 2.0 Emergency/Beta -- depending...)
and have no problems.  I did try to set up an OS/2 boot on a secondary
disk, but had no luck.  I just tried it once, and gave up because I had
the room elsewhere.

>
>Does anyone know how I can get my 1.5 Gig SCSI to co-exist with my two MFM
>drives? BTW -- the MFM drives and controller have been cheerfully running 
>the GA version of OS/2 ever since I got my 1.3 upgrade from IBM.

Never tried, but I hope someone else can help you further.

Jeff


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