8 Sep
2004
8 Sep
'04
5:29 p.m.
On Wed, 2004-09-08 at 08:40, Vintage Computer Festival wrote:
The problem is I'm trying to get a system working with several different
old MO drives (Maxoptix Tahiti 1, Pinnacle Micro REO-650/1300, Sony
<forgot the model>). The Maxoptix is not even being recongized, and may
well be dead dead dead. The Pinnacle is being recognized but I'm getting
the errors mentioned. The Sony drive gets recognized OK and the system
boots but then I get a bizarre message in the Adaptec BIOS that says it's
not a disk drive(!) Well then what is it? It's a Macinstor drive (ugh,
can't think...forgot who the manufacturer is).
ARG! I played with all of these (and continually cursed the day I first
had to deal with them) while I was developing SCSI stuff at IBM.
When I delt with the Tahiti-1 it had continuous microcode updates and
the optical cartidges were not compatible with anyone else's.
The major problems with these drives is that they reported honestly what
they were (r/w optical drives). However, all of the PC code (BIOS, DOS,
etc) thought optical drives were CD-ROMs and were utterly confused by
anything that wasn't (especially 512 byte sector optical drives...and
ones that didn't have the RO bit set).
More reasonable OS's (aka UN*X) handled these beasts a bit better but
the drives themselves were *always* a headache.
As someone previously mentioned, ISA DMA is fiddly at best. Go do this
on a PCI machine.
You probably also want to make sure that the SCSI HBA is configured for
single ended and 5MB/sec or lower (ie async). These SCSI interfaces on
these drives are old and they will probably get very confused with the
more modern auto-config stuff.
--
TTFN - Guy