re problem with adaptec b scsi and jumbo tape drive ron mastus ronaldm extro ucc su oz au wrote i ve just replaced my existing dtc scsi controller with an adaptec b and am now having trouble restoring from a jumbo tape drive here s a document that i wrote some time back it s slightly out of date now that dos has been released but much of it is still useful darryl okahata internet darrylo sr hp com disclaimer this message is the author s personal opinion and does not constitute the support opinion or policy of hewlett packard or of the little green men that have been following him all day id adaptec txt darrylo rel darrylo hints and tips for the adaptec scsi adapter this document contains hints and tips for getting the adaptec scsi adapter to work with various hardware and software packages they are based upon my experiences with an adaptec a controller and will hopefully help others however note that i cannot guarantee that the following will really help you it works for me and the information in this document could possibly cause you to lose some or all of your files on your hard disk important back up the entire contents of your hard disk before trying anything based upon information in this document copyright by darryl okahata this document may be freely copied for personal use only and may not be reprinted in a for profit publication without the consent of the author please note that i have no connection with adaptec other than as a customer topics covered in this document windows enhanced mode floppy controller based tape backup devices sound cards miscellaneous info please note that parts of this document contain technical and sometimes terse descriptions of problems for reference adaptec technical support adaptec bbs please send comments corrections etc via email to me compuserve internet darrylo sr hp com windows enhanced mode the windows install program should automatically configure dos and windows for use with the adaptec however just in case something went wrong i m going to describe some of the changes needed to get windows working with the also you may have noticed that installing windows makes your pc run much slower even when you re not running windows methods of speeding it up are discussed in the section called windows runs slowly msdos configuration the windows install program adds the smartdrive disk cache to your config sys and autoexec bat files if you follow the instructions you ll notice that you ll need to use double buffering with smartdrive this is the default setup you ll also notice that your system runs much much slower in both windows and msdos see the section called windows runs slowly for some ways of speeding your system up windows configuration to get the adaptec to work with windows make sure that the enh section of the system ini file contains the entry virtualhdirq off i believe that the windows install program automatically adds this entry to system ini but i m not sure if this doesn t work for you you might want to try adding some more lines virtualhdirq off systemrombreakpoint false emmexclude a cfff you probably don t need the above lines though the systemrombreakpoint entry is used to enable support for memory managers like qemm max only needed if you use such programs windows runs slowly once you do get windows running with the chances are that your system is running much slower than before if it s not it s probably because you happen to be using aspi dos sys version in your config sys file congratulations this appears to be a winning solution you are very lucky whether your luck will hold out remains to be seen if your system is running much slower than before this is almost definitely caused by smartdrive with double buffering according to the windows documentation and the microsoft technical note q smartdrive double buffering required with aspi dos sys you must use smartdrive with double buffering enabled while this works it really slows down your pc i once estimated that this slowed my pc down by a factor of five as i consider this unacceptable i looked for other solutions unfortunately you cannot just disable double buffering if you do windows in enhanced mode will not work and you might even destroy the contents of your hard disk by trying to run windows what you can do is one of the following use other drivers that provide double buffering it is my opinion that the unbelievable slowness in smartdrive is caused either by horribly inefficient double buffering or by a bug in smartdrive use a driver that provides vds services vds stands for virtual dma services this is a standard which is supported by windows that allows bus mastering disk controllers like the to work with windows after trashing my hard disk countless times i found the following solutions none of which require using smartdrive note however that i am now getting occasional parity errors which are probably not caused by these solutions but might be see below while the following does not require smartdrive using some kind of disk cache utility is strongly recommended as this makes windows run much much faster if you do not have the aspi dos sys driver or you do not need aspi functions for controlling a cdrom tape drive more than two physical hard disks etc you can add the scsiha sys driver to your config sys file e g driver c scsiha sys v windows needs the v option this driver must be loaded into low memory it cannot be loaded into high memory and it occupies about k as of november the scsiha sys driver could be obtained from the adaptec bbs at hopefully it s still there if you need aspi functions and have the aspi dos sys driver version or a you can use both the aspi dos sys and scsiha sys drivers in your config sys file e g driver c aspi dos sys driver c scsiha sys v amazingly enough the scsiha sys driver can also be loaded high assuming you have dos i would have thought that this would crash my system but it doesn t i asked adaptec s technical support about this and they said that loading scsiha sys high should be fine as long as aspi dos sys is loaded low on my system not using scsiha sys with aspi dos a would occasionally cause windows to crash upon restarting or exiting windows with the additional result of a corrupted disk some of my c windows grp files would be corrupted for me these crashes usually occurred while making a different program from progman exe the default windows shell and vice versa this is the reason scsiha sys may be necessary i have absolutely no idea if scsiha sys is necessary with versions of aspi dos earlier than note that many people can use aspi dos or a without scsiha sys they do not seem to have any problems at all i consider these people lucky others like me have had all sorts of problems in my opinion the best but not necessarily the easiest solution is to upgrade to aspi dos the scsiha sys driver is no longer needed unfortunately while you could get previous aspi dos upgrades from the adaptec bbs the aspi dos driver is not available from the adaptec bbs as far as i know there are only three ways to get a copy you can buy the new as of november adaptec ez scsi driver kit which supposedly includes aspi dos as well as other drivers such as cdrom drivers i believe the list price is around if you already have a copy of an older version of aspi dos you can supposedly contact adaptec to upgrade it to ez scsi for around a copy of aspi dos is included in central point pc tools for msdos note that the documentation and driver are stored in different directories note further that only aspi dos is included the cdrom drivers and drivers to support more than two hard disks are not included this is where i obtained my copy of aspi dos note however that i am now getting occasional parity errors with windows in all probability defective hardware in my pc is causing this as i upgraded my motherboard just after i found the above solutions however because these parity errors occur only during disk accesses there is a very small but definite possibility that the parity errors are driver related for example changing the bus on off timing for certain disk transfers might cause this i ve run various memory tests for hours at a time and these tests have found no problems this problem is probably caused by memory with marginal timing requirements which cause parity errors during disk transfers this is why the memory tests didn t find any problems the problems show up only under disk i o however i m mentioning this just in case it isn t a hardware problem floppy controller based tape backup devices there are two possible problems with using the adaptec with a floppy controller based tape backup device such as the colorado memory systems jumbo tape backups restores can take a very long time the tape drive constantly starts stops starts stops etc tape operations may be erratic or encounter too many tape errors this problem might be caused by defective hardware on my however i ve heard of other people having similar problems and so i m mentioning this just in case it is not a hardware problem on my tape backups restores take a long time if you have a floppy controller based tape backup device you may have to adjust the adaptec bus on off timing for best results when using the tape drive normally while doing a tape backup or restore the tape drive motor should be continuously running with only an occasional pause however the default bus timing on the adaptec may cause the tape drive motor to start and stop start and stop every few seconds this causes needless wear to the tape and tape drive however note that a dirty tape head or a defective tape drive can also cause this make sure your tape heads are clean this also causes the tape backup or restore to take much much longer than necessary the problem here is that these tape backups use the floppy dma to transfer data in memory to from the tape drive and the adaptec uses dma to transfer data in memory to from the hard disk the floppy dma needs to feed data to the tape drive at a certain rate if the tape drive is not fed data quickly enough by the floppy dma the tape drive stops rewinds a bit and restarts once enough data is eventually fed to it the default bus timing on the adaptec which is really dma timing is too large for example when a backup is done data has to be transferred from a hard disk to memory and then from memory to the tape because the default timing on the adaptec hogs the memory too much too much time is spent transferring data from a hard disk to memory not enough time is spent transferring data from memory to the tape drive as a result the tape drive constantly starts and stops because data is not fed to it quickly enough the solution is to change the adaptec s bus on off timing the default factory setting is microseconds on and microseconds off the bus on timing needs to be lowered to microseconds this can be done in one of two ways if you have aspi dos you can use the n option for example i use a bus on timing of microseconds which means that i use the following line in my config sys file device c aspi dos sys n note that there is no space between the n and the if you don t have aspi dos your only recourse is to try to find a program called setscsi exe which is very difficult to find the reason is that adaptec for reasons of their own does not seem to want this widely distributed i once asked someone who worked for adaptec and they asked me to not upload it anywhere if you have anonymous ftp access to the internet you could try using archie to hunt down a copy i believe that there are a couple of sites that have it if you do find a copy you run it like so setscsi n this adjusts the bus on timing to microseconds running setscsi exe without any arguments resets the bus timing back to the factory defaults note that it seems that you cannot use setscsi exe if you use aspi dos setscsi exe crashed my system if aspi dos was loaded i could use setscsi exe with scsiha sys however do not lower the bus on timing below microseconds or increase it above microseconds if you lower it too low the hard disk throughput will suddenly drop your system will feel slower for me microseconds works fine this value may work fine for you or you may have to adjust it downwards a little once you ve lowered the bus on timing tape backups and restores should run faster also do not experiment with the bus on off times with the other options that i have intentionally not described unless you know what you are doing bad combinations can cause parity errors and worse by starving memory refresh a program called bustifix exe exists on the adaptec bbs unless this has been upgraded since i last checked which has been a while this is a self extracting archive containing a batch file and a couple of other files this batch file was supposed to allow one to set the bus on off times for the and others however when i tried running this program with my a my system crashed at the time i was running scsiha sys and i didn t check to see if there was a conflict with it maybe this old program works only with the b although the docs say that it works with the a erratic tape operations or too many tape errors this problem may or may not exist although it existed on my system a hardware problem just on my particular could cause it however i ve heard of other people having similar problems and so i m mentioning this just in case it isn t a hardware problem just on my symptoms of this problem which persists even after cleaning the tape head backing up to tape encounters unusable sector detected errors resulting in an aborted tape backup tape backup works but the tape compare fails the tape drive starts stops starts stops etc much too often unlike the above mentioned problem tape backups restores take a long time where the tape drive starts and stops every few seconds this kind of starting stopping occurs every few seconds or so fastback plus does not find see any tape backup devices other programs like central point backup and the cms jumbo software assuming that you have a cms jumbo tape drive can find see the tape drive but fastback plus cannot too many tape read errors although i do not know what is causing this problem i discovered that using a different floppy controller solves it a few months ago i upgraded my motherboard which contained an integrated floppy controller as i already had a floppy controller on the i initially disabled the motherboard floppy controller after a while i decided to try disabling the floppy controller and using the one on the motherboard when i did this the tape drive a cms jumbo reliability increased dramatically and fastback plus was suddenly able to find and use the tape drive i don t know if this was caused by a hardware problem on my on the one hand the floppy drives worked great when they were attached to the which seems to say that there was nothing wrong with the on the other hand the tape drive didn t work well attached to the floppy controller but it did work when attached to a different controller this could be an indication of a hardware problem on my i did change floppy drive cables and so it is conceivable that the problem was in the cables i don t know what the cause really is however if you re having similar problems you might want to consider trying a new floppy controller sound cards many popular sound cards can play or record digitized sound and this is typically done using dma like the tape drive dma the adaptec s dma can conflict with the sound card dma unlike that of the tape dma this conflict usually manifests itself as a parity error your system crashes with a parity error message what happens is that data is being transferred so quickly by the sound card and the adaptec memory refresh cannot occur quickly enough which causes a parity error usually getting a parity error means that there is a hardware problem with your system in this case however the parity error is not a symptom of bad hardware i ve found that such parity errors typically occur while recording digitized sound and the chances of such errors increase as you increase the recording fidelity e g higher sampling rate recording in stereo recording using bits instead of etc like the tape drive solution the solution here is to lower the adaptec s bus on timing see the section on tape drives for information on how this is done note however that this may or may not solve the problem it may only reduce the probability of a parity error the software used to record digitized sound can greatly affect this problem i e some software is inefficient disk caches the speed of your hard disk and the amount of disk fragmentation can also affect this miscellaneous info this section contains miscellaneous hints tips and rumors much of it is merely information that i ve heard or read about and have not verified i believe that the following information is correct but i m not sure use it at your own risk with qemm and you need to specify the db parameter e g db unless you are using the aspi dos driver if you don t qemm will crash hang at bootup although the qemm manual mentions this the install program does not seem to detect that a is present and automatically add this option to the qemm command line at least this occurred with the qemm install program i haven t tested any other version earlier versions of qemm probably need this parameter but i m not sure i ve never used a version earlier than if you use aspi dos you do not need to give qemm the db parameter some or all versions of the do not support hard disks over one gigabyte in size to support hard disks with capacities over gb you need to get a new rom bios from adaptec i m not sure if this is still true of the latest bs being sold by adaptec to connect a cdrom drive to the you need a scsi cdrom drive and some drivers note that some cdrom drives have proprietary interfaces non scsi these drives cannot be used with the you have three choices for cdrom drivers i have no idea how well the following solutions work or even if they work the following is secondhand information you can buy adaptec s ez scsi driver package which lists for something like if you already have older adaptec drivers you can supposedly upgrade to ez scsi for around contact adaptec for details the ez scsi package supposedly contains everything that you need you can buy the corelscsi driver package which is made by the same people that make coreldraw this package contains cdrom drivers scsi tape drivers worm drivers etc i do not know the list price but i ve seen this package sold for around note that corelscsi does not come with the aspi dos driver which is needed if you do not already have aspi dos you may be better off getting adaptec s ez scsi instead this method is obsolete as the following drivers have been obsoleted by adaptec s ez scsi kit but i m mentioning it in case someone already has these drivers you can use the drivers in the adaptec asw kit aspi dos and the asw kit aspi cdrom drivers you will have to get a copy of mscdex exe a high level cdrom driver if it is not included in the asw kit but this is available from several bulletin boards to use a scsi tape drive with the you need software that knows how to talk to a scsi tape drive software that i ve heard about are again like the above section on cdrom drives i have no idea how well the following solutions work or even if they work the following is secondhand information central point pc tools for msdos supposedly supports a large number of scsi tape drives it comes with scsi drivers aspi dos as well as central point backup the corelscsi driver package contains a scsi tape backup program see the above section on cdrom drives for more details however note that corelscsi does not come with but requires aspi dos i ve seen advertisements that sell the in three configurations scsi controller with hard disk rom bios scsi controller w bios and adaptec aspi drivers scsi controller w bios adaptec aspi drivers and corelscsi drivers programs i imagine that adaptec now sells the in a fourth configuration scsi controller w bios and ez scsi drivers including aspi drivers those people who use unix might be interested in a version of gnu tar for msdos that talks to a scsi tape drive via the aspi dos driver you need this driver before you can use this program i ve never used this version of gnu tar but i ve heard that it works i don t know how well though if you have anonymous ftp access to the internet a copy can be found on wsmr simtel army mil and mirror sites pd msdos dskutl aspibin zip gnu tar for scsi tape drives adaptec xx aspipat zip patches for aspibin relative to gnu tar aspisrc zip src for gnu tar for scsi tape adaptec ctrlr i have no idea if a copy can be found on compuserve unixforum might have it if any forum does as far as msdos is concerned the a and the b controllers are the same with msdos the a should work as well as the b however the hardware for these two boards is not identical and there is at least one non msdos program that initially did not work with a a but did work with a b bsd a version of bsd unix in case anyone s curious here s an edited copy of my config sys file files buffers break on stacks device c sys dev aspi dos sys d n device c qemm qemm sys on ram rom dma st m x f ffff dos high umb devicehigh c sys dev nnansi sys devicehigh c dos setver exe shell c dos command com p note that i m using qemm and aspi dos if i were using aspi dos or a i d probably have to use a config sys that looked like files buffers break on stacks device c sys dev aspi dos sys d n device c qemm qemm sys on ram rom dma st m x f ffff dos high umb devicehigh c sys dev scsiha sys v devicehigh c sys dev nnansi sys devicehigh c dos setver exe shell c dos command com p if i weren t using aspi dos i d probably use something that looked like files buffers break on stacks device c sys dev scsiha sys v device c qemm qemm sys on ram rom db dma st m x f ffff dos high umb devicehigh c sys dev nnansi sys devicehigh c dos setver exe shell c dos command com p however if i used a floppy controller based tape drive or if i planned to record high quality sound from a sound card i would still need some way of changing the adaptec s bus on off times the first two versions of config sys take care of this but this last version doesn t local variables fill column eval auto fill mode nil end
