Good haul of old pc stuph

[Chuck Guzis]

On 12/16/2005 at 1:49 PM Jim Leonard wrote:

>Thanks, I'll check this out.  But once I have the ASPI layer set up,
>what's 
>next?  Will it just "show up" if I run FDISK or are additional steps
>necessary?
>
>(Sorry for these admittedly newbie questions but I've never worked with
>SCSI in 
>DOS before, only MFM/RLL/ESDI/IDE).

ASPI is easy--one of the good standards that came out of DOS--there's a
Windows version of it also (16 and 32 bit).  All you need is the correct
ASPI device-specific driver in addition to the ASPI driver for your card.
So, for a disk drive, it's going to be named something like ASPIDISK.SYS.
Add this after the ASPI driver in your CONFIG.SYS and you're off and
running--there may be other utilities included for managing an ASPI-driven
SCSI disk drive.  I haven't checked lately, but Adaptec included some
fairly generic device-related drivers  and utilities in their DOS driver
kit (which was free for downloading).  

It's a layered approach.  So, for example, to attach a SCSI hard drive to a
PC using the Trantor/Adaptec T358 parallel port-to-SCSI "fat cable", my
config sys would contain the following:

DEVICE=MA358.SYS
DEVICE=ASPIDISK.SYS

There was a competitor to ASPI, called CAM, for Common Access Manager.  It
was similar to ASPI but somewhat more complex, some cards (Future Domain
was one) used that in place of, or in addition to ASPI. 

Cheers,
Chuck