Re: SCSI regocnized but not approachable
- From: "Folkert Rienstra" <see_reply-to@xxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2007 15:35:54 +0100
"Michael Baeuerle" <michael.baeuerle@xxxxxxx> wrote in message news:bjglb4-k71.ln1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Folkert Rienstra wrote:
Michael Baeuerle wrote:
[...]
To format a SCSI disk you have to send a FORMAT UNIT command to the disk
No you don't (have to).
(the disk itself will then do the job alone). A normal PC BIOS do not
support such things because it was not designed for SCSI.
That's why you have ASPI.
You nevertheless have to send the command yourself,
Nonsense. That's what FMTSCSI is for.
ASPI is just an API.
So? Same goes for drivers. It's the apps that matter.
Try this tool again without loading the drivers and it will fail.
So what.
At least the hostadapter drivers are loaded and the access have not used
the BIOS routines.
There is nothing wrong with using the BIOS routines.
If the BIOS routines fail so will very likely the driver's.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^When starting DOS all seems to go right untill the drives drivers are
being loaded, the message "no drives found" comes up.
I don't know the Dawicontrol drivers but this message may simply mean
that no "DOS drives" (C:, D:, etc) are found because there is no
partition table and no filesystem on the disks.
Not with ASPI.
??? IMHO the API is not relevant for this question.
Yes, it is.
Even with CAM or any
other API you have a hostadapter driver for hardware abstraction.
On top of this you have device class drivers, a disk driver in this case.
Correct. It looks for drives and it depends on ASPI to see them.
It is the disk driver that may print such a message (regardless whether it
uses ASPI or another API).
I don't think it concerns itself with partitioning. That's for DOS.
You formerly wrote:^^^^^
Sofar I've tried W2K, W2003 server, WIN98 and Ubuntu Linux and DOS[...]
IMHO you should use Linux for testing (it is much better suited for this
task as DOS).
No it isn't.
OK, you asked for it ;-) Here are 5 reasons:
1) SCSI is supported by Linux
By DOS too, through BIOS and/or through ASPI.
You simply have to add the hostadapter driver, the SCSI support itself
and the device class drivers are generic and integrated in Linux.
For DOS you have to do nothing if you have a BIOS
For DOS you have to install a complete SCSI subsystem because DOS
have nothing helpful integrated.
It simply uses BIOS.
Only if you have a biosless controller do you need ASPI and ASPI drivers.
2) Linux has an additional abstraction layer.
There are hostadapter drivers for hardware abstraction and there are
device class drivers (up to this point similar to the DOS/ASPI scheme).
The difference is the additional SCSI midlayer driver. It contains
routines that are neither hardware nor device class dependent. One thing
that this additional driver can do for you is logging of error messages.
You can just run the mfgr diagnostics for that.
They can be configured to be very verbose (and human readable) and are
vendor independent.
3) ASPI is not really vendor independent
Not in DOS, no.
In Windows the device dependent parts are covered by the device driver.
This may or may not an ASPI design flaw but along to my experience ASPI
is not ASPI.
You cannot combine an ASPI hostadapter driver with an
arbitrary ASPI device class driver from a different vendor
And why would you.
- sometimes such combinations don't work as expected.
Shrug.
It is a good idea to always use the device class drivers shipped with the
hostadapter. With Linux the abstraction and re-usage of known working
code is much more advanced.
4) Tools
On Linux there are many general purpose SCSI tools available out of the
box, for DOS you have to get them from the hostadapter vendor or second
sources. MS don't have useful things on the OS media for this purpose.
5) Selfmade options
Most people won't do but if you have the skills you can write your own
tools. The whole framework and documentation is right there, you have to
pay no cent. If all fails you can look at the source code of the Linux
drivers to see what they are doing (again it is right there, you don't
have to ask MS or the hostadapter vendor). With closed source software
like DOS and proprietary vendor drivers such things are much harder.
Maybe that's so because there is a lack of real SCSI diagnostic programs.
The only advantage for DOS that I can see in this comparison is that DOS
is smaller and may boot a bit faster.
Most diagnostic programs are for DOS.
One very good one, Bart's SCSITool, is for DOS.
It too has human readable error codes.
Because most people use WindowsNT.
with GUI today, there is no longer an advantage for DOS in the way
"It is always there" or "I already know how it works".
Micha
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