SCSI Moron needs help

[houseisland]

Hi.

I am trying to set up a SCSI controller and HDD with the controller as a secondary card to the IDE controller. The BIOS is off on the SCSI card. The jumpers on the card are set correctly. The drivers load properly. There is no hardware termination. Adaptec's SCSI utilities for fdisking and formating the HDD work properly, and the drive checks out OK, but DOS cannot see the drive when the system reboots.

Besides the jumpers which indicate SCSI #, there are two jumpers closed on the Maxtor drive, one for termination power and one for power up; these are both jumpered. Should they be?

What am I doing wrong?

Thanks.

[schultzz]

For your hard drive to work with DOS, you either must have the BIOS enabled, which should work OK with your senario, or you must load another DOS driver that allows DOS to see your other hard drives. I've seen this on an older Adaptec card, but I forget the name of the driver. Sometimes Adaptec's site is helpful, but oftentimes it is not. You may want to check it out first.

If you have any IDE drive, it normally will boot first and become your C: drive. SCSI comes after that, unless you have the setting in the BIOS to change it, in which case you can reverse the order.

Hope this helps. If you let us know which controller you have, someone may know what driver you need.

Mark

[houseisland]

I have tried with both an Adaptec AH-1540CF and an Adaptec AH-1542C, both of which require the same dos driver, a driver which I have and which loads properly. With both cards the situation is the same. Adaptec's dos utilities will see the HDD but dos will not.

[schultzz]

Just want to check to be sure...

Once you have low-level formatted the drive with Adaptec's utilities, did you run FDISK from DOS? If so, does it find the drive?

Mark

[houseisland]

Hi.

Yes, after running the Adaptec low-level format utility from dos, I ran the Adaptec fdisk utility from dos. It found the drive and put a partition on it. It then instructed me to reboot to save the changes. However, upon reboot dos cannot see the drive. Yet when the dos Adaptec low-level format utility is run again it can verify the drive. And the Adaptec fdisk utility shows that the partition is indeed on the drive.

[schultzz]

Next step...

Did you format the drive? This is a high-level format.

You use

FORMAT C:

to prepare the drive for use, or

FORMAT C: /S

to prepare it to be bootable, which transfers all of the necessary system files after the formatting is done (IO.SYS, MSDOS.SYS, COMMAND.COM).

Mark

[houseisland]

Hi.

Sorry to be so troublesome. The SCSI drive is not the C: drive. The C: drive is the IDE drive. This is why I have the BIOS turned off on the SCSI card.

I can't high level format the SCSI drive with the dos format command if dos can't see the drive. Do I need to do this? I think the Adaptec read me file said not to; I'll check again.

Thanks.

[houseisland]

Hi.

Item #4 for Adaptec's instructions for the driver:

4.) If the drive is unformatted, AND you are using the Adaptec driver, the disk must be partitioned with the program AFDISK in order to have the OS assign a drive letter. Run AFDISK and follow the prompts to partition your drive. The drive is high level formatted for DOS at the same time, so the DOS FORMAT command is not needed.

[houseisland]

Hi.

I have given up on the driver option and have enabled the bios. With a bit of trial and error I have come up with a solution that seems to work just fine. It shouldn't work if I am reading the manual correctly, but it does work just the same. All drives are recognized. The system boots from C:, the IDE drive. Read and write tests go off without a hitch. So I guess I'm OK. Thanks for your infinite patience, Mark.

[This message has been edited by houseisland (edited December 22, 1999).]