Re: REQ: OLD SCSI driver for Panasonic LS3700 optical drive

Scott Lurndal wrote:

Rick <rickajho@xxxxxxx> writes:
Looking for original DOS SCSI driver/utilities for:

Panasonic LS3700 aka
Matshita LF-3700 aka
Plasmon RF7030

"phase change" 1.5G optical drive. There's next to nothing about
these drives on the net, and no OEM drivers to be found anywhere.

Trying to help someone out who needs to retrieve old lab data off disks.
But the disks were formatted with the DOS driver and format routine, and
any version of Win 9.x and up can't read those disks with the SCSI

What, precisely, do you mean by "can't read those disks"? Do you
get I/O errors in the windows event log (for 2k & XP)? Does the
data just look wrong? Any messages produced? I've written NT
SCSI class drivers for these, reads are simply passed through to
the drive - there is nothing particularly special about the SCSI
command set vis-a-vis READ6/READ10 on these drives, IIRC.

Hi Scott

"Disk in drive is not formatted..."

As far as the data on the drive, that's purely an operating system
thing and has nothing to do with the SCSI driver. What format was
the data written to the disk as? Raw? FAT-16? FAT-32?

I was told it was FAT-16

Boot a Knoppix live-cd on the system in question and try to access
the M-O drive using the dd command.

scott

driver it installs for these drives. (That's been technically confirmed
as correct, unfortunately.)

Rick

The only info I found at the time was the the original format laid down
for these disks by the OEM format routine was 512 bytes/sector and that
the Win 9.x driver installed by hardware detection refuses to see disks
formatted in this manner, formats/reformats the disks at 1024
bytes/sector under Win 9.x, and refuses to read these disks if not
formatted accordingly.

The drive has been confirmed as functional. It will format and write to
disks - very old disks at that - under Win 98 but it won't read the
disks that were formatted with the DOS routine included with the drive.

Rick
.