Re: Read Zenith 396-25 MS-DOS hard drive on OS/2?

Sir:

Mike Luther wrote:
Thanks Bill ..

William L. Hartzell wrote:
Sir:

Mike Luther wrote:
HI Ilya!

Ilya Zakharevich wrote:
[A complimentary Cc of this posting was sent to
Mike Luther <mike.luther@xxxxxxxxxx>], who wrote in article
<47861f0b$0$19892$bbae4d71@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
Booting from a floppy/CD avoids all this mess of which driver is
"first".
First you have to get the motherboard to boot to floppies at all
Understood. This is why I mentioned CD...

Hope this helps,
Ilya
OK takes a while to build a box just for trying all this, but I did.
MCP2 latest whatever, but with an old PII 300 or less MHZ CPU, and a
motherboard which can manhandle IRQ's to PCI, IDE .. whatever. OK, here
is what I know so far and could use suggestions for what to do next. I
built the box with a 'standard' SCSI hard drive against an Adaptec
2940U2W controller for it. As well, I deliberately set the IBM1S506.ADD
IDE driver behind that Adaptec SCSI disk driver so as to not run into
issues that way. The test box, as long as the IDE chipsets on the
motherboard are enabled will boot from the SCSI hard drive, the CD-ROM
drive to a command prompt, or from the Floppy DIsk Utility boot disks.

However, no matter what memory location of four possible choices on the
6280 ISA controller card I use, as long as I even enable the IDE chips
on the motherboard, I don't 'see' any activity on that 6280
controller. Nor is it seen if I boot from the CD-ROM. The 6280 card
has a floppy
drive controller disable pin switch setting. If I disable the floppy
drive controller on it I don't have any trouble seeing, or booting from
the standard floppy disk drive to OS/2 on the box either. But I do if
I leave that dip switch enabled for the floppy disks on that controller
card.

Now ..

If I disable the on-motherboard IDE chips and force IRQ 14 to the ISA
slots, then plug in either my 6280-15T or 6280-15TX, with the floppy
drive controller on that ISA controller card disabled, I can either boot
fully to the SCSI hard disk, or with the floppy utility disk set to an
OS/2 command line prompt.

From either way, I get to see definite hard disk red light wink in this
old hard drive as the IBM1S506.ADD driver touches the 6280 card, Either
way I get to see, with a /V command prompt on this driver, that for
either the standard port or, if I use the alternate port 170 setting on
the 6280 card, that the IBM1S506.ADD driver has 'seen' the 6290 card and
knows it is there after the boot run. I think that is progress. With
either a full hard drive boot, or just the floppy boot. There are four
total address locations available for the 6280 controller card. It
seems to make no difference whether I use the standard D800 address or
whatever, for whatever happens next.

Now .. no matter what I do, OS/2 doesn't 'recognize' the hard disk
attached to that 6280 controller. It just reports "No device" or
whatever it says on the /V text during the CONFIG.SYS run. That thought
the red light winks several times for this old hard drive during the
touch process.

By itself, the IBM1S506.ADD device driver thus seems unable to 'see' the
drive attached to the controller. Though it winks it.

Suggestions? Anyone?


WAG. Do you have the cable pin 1 connected to pin 1 on the drive? How
about the card? If yes to both, then try a different cable. If still
no action, then try a different disk. Are you using a 80-wire cable?

Very good question! The DTC 6280-15T and 6280-15TX are both ISA
controller cards which have the older hard drive cable connection and
cables for the older hard drives which use two flat cables. They are
not the 80 wire cable type we see more or less now days. In this case,
if you connect a single to a two drive cable and it is at the end with
the twisted wire part at the far end, you need to configure the drive as
the #2 drive .. even if it is to be the #1 drive as I understand and
recall doing this years ago. Also, the termination must be enabled on
that drive as well, if it is the only drive on the controller card.

In this case, the drive, cables and controller card are exactly what was
pulled from the Z386-25 .. as a single bootable hard drive .. last known
as working. As well, it is a fact that the drive does spin up on power
up, and as noted, I see the red light flash as the computer and
controller apparently try to 'see' the drive during the boot run.

Answering your question. I have more than one cable. Changing cables
makes no difference. Change drives? OK, I have two more drives,
actually brought one of them here for testing like you suggested.
OOPS! The one I brought doesn't have the round 4 pin power cable
socket! It has the older flat pin power cable male plug pin interface!
I don't have a power cable interface for it and might be able to get
that conjured up after this weekend. Alternatively, I also have one
more of these older hard drives at another site. This weekend I'll see
if it has the later power socket and try it.

More important though .. and in answer to the other well thought out
Linux power up suggestion. I also have a complete DOS boot up disk
together with DFSDOS on it for test purposes. It will boot this same
computer to DOS. DFSDOS runs and sees the MCP SCSI hard drive just fine
from DOS. But, despite the fact that the hard drive red light blinks
during the DOS boot and DFS operation, DFSDOS doesn't see this hard
drive either.

Which leads me to think there has to be some controller-motherboard-BIOS
or other hardware and code interface problem which is preventing the
drive from being 'seen', and not an issue at this point that Dani's
DANIS506.ADD would solve. But in the next day or so I'll try her latest
version 1.7.10 which I have which doesn't have name conflict issues with
the other IBM device drivers. Just to see if that would work for the
MCP2 boot run as Ilya has suggested. I'll post that answer here to him
as well when I find it.

Thanks!

I think what you are describing is the old ESDI drives? That controller
has its own BIOS. Have you configured it from DOS?
--
Bill
Thanks a Million!
.

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