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Adaptec 1520 in IBM AT (5170)

Getafix

Experienced Member
Joined
Apr 28, 2022
Messages
63
Location
Vancouver, BC
Hi,

I am trying to get an Adaptec 1520 to go in my AT. SCSI BIOS is 1.4. I am using this with a BlueSCSI. At startup I see the bios and it sees the drive (reports it correctly as a Quantum Fireball) and assigns it as D: (I have an MFM drive in there as well). If I load aspi2dos.sys it also reports setting up Int 13 for drive D: With or without aspi2dos.sys, PC-TOOLS' si.exe will report a second drive (up to 1Gig capacity with my current, default, jumper settings). However, dos does not recognize this second drive as valid (format d: will report it as not a valid drive). More worrying is that ezscsi will always say: no host adapter. Another thing I find weird is that when I set the J9 jumper from I1 to I0 (from IRQ 11 to IRQ 10) the BIOS still reports the Jumper settings as IRQ 11 at boot-up time.

Is it possible the card is bad (I don't see the red LED ever come on)? Has anyone else set up a 5170 to use SCSI2SD or BlueSCSI with an Adaptec 1520? I have tried using gsetup to set the 1st drive to 0 and the card did report making the drive C: and then did a boot from floppy. But of course still no drive C: I should say that my HD0.HDA file is (currently 750M) of all 0's. Setting 2 drives in the IBM BIOS caused the card to say there are 2 drives and move on (do nothing), as I expected.

Any thoughts on what I may be seeing? Should I try an alternate 5170 BIOS (I want to do that anyway but it would be good to know if there's a known incompatibility with the original BIOS). I am pretty new to all things SCSI (other than replacing SCSI drives with SCSI2SD or BlueSCSI on apple or next computers). BTW I am not using any TSRs (so no PC-Tools caching, for example).

I should add that fdisk will say that it could not access disk 2. I then choose disk 2 and create a partition, and reboot. fdisk again reports it cannot access drive 2, and the partition information is no longer there when I choose drive 2 and list partition info. Looking at the HD0.hda in a hex editor shows that it has been modified. At specific offsets (every 0x4000 for a length of 0x01FF) 0xF6 was written into the file.

Thank you
Stefan
 
Last edited:
If the card has a BIOS, you do not need to load anything at all. ASPI is used for CD-ROMs and other removable storage devices, but not for hard disks.

What DOS version are you running? Having various Adaptec 15xx controllers running in old systems as well, I can tell you that you need MS-DOS 5.0 at minimum and the option to support 1 GB and up set in the controller's BIOS to make your setup work.
 
Hi,

Progress. Thank you @1ST1 - your mention made me realize something. Before, I messed around with ASPI2DOS.SYS but had forgotten about fdisk. When I tried fdisk, I wasn't loading aspi2dos.sys. Now, when I load aspi2dos.sys, fdisk doesn't complain and I was able to partition, reboot and format the drive as D: after the reboot. So, that's all great but not the end.

@Timo W. I am on DOS 6.22. I was hoping what you say would work, but it doesn't seem to. After I did the fdisk (Primary DOS partition, whole disk) and format d: /s, I unplugged the MFM drive, after setting it to not installed (so no HD installed) in the BIOS. Now the machine says "attempting to boot from floppy" then "attempting to boot from hard disk" and then goes to ROM Basic. If I do boot from floppy, and don't load aspi2dos, I still see no C: drive. If I boot with the DOS 6.22 Installation floppy, DOS says it cannot install DOS to the computer as an error was detected trying to read or write to the hard disk. If I boot with a floppy that has DEVICE=aspi2dos.sys in a config.sys, then the C: drive does show up and is totally usable.

The BIOS on the card has boot = enabled but it appears to me that DOS can't boot from a SCSI drive directly? Seems the Int 13h hook has to be routed through the ASPI manager.

I am out of my league here so maybe this is a dumb question - Is there perhaps another BIOS that has an ASPI manager and will boot from a SCSI? (I guess one way to find out is just to try some other of the BIOSs ;)

Thank you
Stefan
 
Hi,

On a whim I booted with my config.sys floppy allowing me to see the SCSI disk. Then I installed DOS from there. Now, when I reboot (no floppy) after seeing "Attempting to boot from Hard Disk." I do see Starting MS-DOS. Then both floppy drives are pulsed and the machine hangs there. So there is some attempt to boot from that SCSI disk. Seems I am close, but no cigar.

Thanks
Stefan
 
If the card has a BIOS, you do not need to load anything at all. ASPI is used for CD-ROMs and other removable storage devices, but not for hard disks.

What DOS version are you running? Having various Adaptec 15xx controllers running in old systems as well, I can tell you that you need MS-DOS 5.0 at minimum and the option to support 1 GB and up set in the controller's BIOS to make your setup work.

That's wrong... Adaptec provides two kinds of drivers in it's EZ SCSI packet.

1. Controller drivers, like aspi2dos, aspi4dos, aspi8dos, ASPIeDOS, etc. They are specific to the SCSI controller and they provide an ASPI interface for the drive drivers.

2. drive drivers, like ASPIDISK, ASPICD, etc.. They are specific for the drives, aspidisk handles harddisks and mounts them to the MS-DOS if it finds FAT partitions. ASPICD is the driver for CD-drives and it provides an interface to MSCDEX. These drivers are using the ASPI interface provided by the controller drivers.

Also other manufacturer were using the ASPI interface, like IOMEGA which provides a lot of ASPI-drivers for their parallel port solution. So for example ASPIPPM1/ASPIPPM2 is a kind of virtual controller driver to support the ZIP drives oon parallel port. As soon as you have loaded aspippm driver, you can mount the ZIP filesystem using Adaptecs ASPIDISK.SYS. This can save some memory for example if you have SCSI-controller plus parallel port ZIP, for example, ylo load aspi4dos for an Adaptec 1542 controller, then ypi load aspippm1.sys for the ZIP drive, then you load ASPIDISK.sys to mount the SCSI harddisks and the ZIP drive in one step. No need to load IOMEGA's SCSICFG driver, it's job already is done by ASPIDISK. There were also ASPI drivers from TEKRAM, Future-Domain, etc., and all are ASPI compatibe to each other.

example, Adaptec 1542x plus parallelport ZIP drive:

rem for 1542
device=c:\adaptec\aspi4dos.sys /D /p=330
rem for ZIPdrv
device=c:\iomega\aspippm1.sys FILE=NIBBLE.ILM SPEED=10 Country=049 Quiet
rem assigns SCSI disks and ZIP drive drive letter
device=c:\adaptec\aspidisk.sys /d
rem interface for MSCDEX CDROM
device=c:\adaptec\aspicd.sys /d:aspicd0 /id=5

What maybe mix up is about BIOS on the SCSI controllers, there are different behaviours of different SCSI BIOS:

1. old BIOS versions, like on Adaptec 1542A/B: They only assign attached harddisk to MS-DOS if there is no other bootable drive like MFM, RLL, ESDI, IDE or other SCSI-controller. Depending on the BIOS version they may only assign the first two drives they find on the SCSI-bus, early BIOS only assign SCSI ID 0 and 1 harddisk if found.
2. new BIOS versions like on Adaptec 1542C/CF/CP: They assign up to 7 harddisks, some versions only assign them if the SCSI controller is the first bootable device, like above.
3. No SCSI BIOS supports CD-drives, so in this case ASIxDOS and ASPICD is needed anyway.

Tipp: If you don't boot from the SCSI controller, but from MFM, RLL, ESDI, IDE drive, disable SCSI controller BIOS and use the ASPI drivers, like above example, that is more flexible. It is also saving upper memory which can be used to upload drivers (devicehigh?, QEMM, 386Max, ...)
 
Hi,

On a whim I booted with my config.sys floppy allowing me to see the SCSI disk. Then I installed DOS from there. Now, when I reboot (no floppy) after seeing "Attempting to boot from Hard Disk." I do see Starting MS-DOS. Then both floppy drives are pulsed and the machine hangs there. So there is some attempt to boot from that SCSI disk. Seems I am close, but no cigar.

Thanks
Stefan

Check with your DOS boot disk

a) first partition is active, see in fdisk
b) harddisk has master boot record, write one with "fdisk /mbr"
c) first partiion has bootable files (io.sys, msdos.sys, command.com), run "sys c:"
 
That's wrong... Adaptec provides two kinds of drivers in it's EZ SCSI packet.
You say it's wrong and then write what just backs up my statement. ASPI is for stuff like CD-ROM, ZIP, MO etc. That's what I wrote. Also, I'm aware that ASPI is split into two parts. No idea why you put emphasis on that. ASPI is a software package.

A SCSI card with a ROM *does not need* anything to be loaded for hard disks. It will hook into the BIOS' boot routine to allow booting from a SCSI hard disk. That's how it always worked.

Yes, with a ROM-less SCSI card, you need to load drivers to even see a hard disk. But that's not the situation we have here and of course in such a case, you can never boot from SCSI anyway.
 
ASPIDISK.SYS is for harddisk drives. And it depends on what controllers you have. For example if you have Adaptec 1542A and you have harddisks on ID 0,1 2, 3, then it's BIOS only assigns ID 0 and ID 1 drive. ID 2 and 3 is not assigned by 1542A BIOS. For ID 2 and 3 you need to load ASPIDISK. If you only have harddisk on ID 2,3, etc and not on ID 0,1, no BIOS support for these harddsisk, you need to use ASPIDISK If you boot from IDE, then 1542A will not assign any harddisk, you need ASPIDISK. Some of the 1520 BIOS are as old as 1542A and they behave exactly the same.

And additionally, if 1542A BIOS finds harddisk which does not autospin, then no drive letter is assigned, only aspidisk.sys will spin it up.
 
Arguing semantics about ASPI disk managers aside, I'm pretty sure the real issue here is a compatibility problem between the IBM ROM BIOS and the option ROM from adaptec. I say this because (as previously said) it should be no problem to manage a single SCSI disk on a controller w/ROM without any installable device drivers at all in a standard DOS environment.
 
Hi,

Trying some things based on the thread.

I created 4 "hard disks" of 40 megabytes each. The BIOS mounts 0 and 1 as C: and D:. Floppy boot. ASPI2DOS hooks Int 13H and I can see C: and D: with fdisk. I format C: /s (and later do fdisk /mbr and set partition 1 to active since that wasn't done when I created the primary partition). I see "Starting MS-DOS" but it will hang. I can see and access both C: and D: though from the floppy boot. -- I learnt that I have to set the partition active manually - I didn't know that.

If I load ASPIDISK (by itself) it doesn't load saying there's no ASPI Manager. If I load it after ASPI2DOS, it says there are no local SCSI drives, and also doesn't load. I was wondering if drives 3 and 4 might show up using ASPIDISK but that's not what happened. This controller (AHA-1520, not 1520A, so without a floppy controller) - supports only 2 drives, I think.

For completeness - drive C: has io.sys, msdos.sys, command.com & drvspace.bin when I try to boot from it, and it hangs.

Next stop (after a few hours of errands coming up) I'll see if relocating the Adaptec BIOS helps at all. I think the fact that ezscsi says it can't see the controller is probably the clue - even when I force it with custom to look only for the 152x (and friends).

Thank you
Stefan
 
Hi,

RESOLVED! :)

Moving the AHA-1520 BIOS location did nothing, changing the IRQ did nothing but changing the AT BIOS to the AMI one from minuszerodegrees did the trick. The 5170 now boots flawlessly from the SCSI!

It also resolved another issue I was having. I put a Gotek in as A and set the BIOS as 1.44MB 3.5" but 1.44MB 3.5" disk images would give read errors. 1.2MB worked perfectly. Now all images work perfectly.

Thank you all for your suggestions. Happy to report success.

Thank you
Stefan
 
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