Mike's PCjr Page

Oh, it wasn't even a matter of bad English - I just parsed the sentence wrong the first time I read it. It's clear now. Your English is far better than my French - when I'm in Quebec I just act dumb rather than try to insult people in their own language ..

As for ASPIPPM1.SYS - your discovery is still useful. If you wanted to avoid using GUEST.EXE for some reason you have discovered an alternative - ASPIDISK.SYS.


Mike

Brutman wrote:when I'm in Quebec I just act dumb rather than try to insult people in their own language

You know, I think most people would be happy with your trying to speak their language and forgive you any mistake you could make. Don't be shy. They may switch to English at some point if they realize you can't hold a conversation, but they'll definitely appreciate the effort.

Christian

Brutman wrote:

hyperfrog wrote:Just wondering... Did I accidentally discover that not only the Iomega's driver could be used on an 8088-based machine (to be confirmed), but ZIP Plus drives, or even ZIP 250 drives would also be usable on the PCjr?

It took me a while to parse this, but I think I'm reading it correctly now. If the Zip drivers give you an ASPI interface to the drive, then the Adaptec ASPIDISK should give you access to anything behind that interface. The only thing you would be missing is the weirdo read protect capability that the Zip drives have - you have to use their ZipTools to work with that feature. Otherwise, it just looks like a generic SCSI disk behind an ASPI driver.

I wish I had a Zip 250 to test with ...


Mike

I just bought a Zip 250 with cable, power supply, and disk for $20 shipped on ebay. We'll know soon.

Sorry guys, ASPIDISK.SYS does not work with ASPIPPM2.SYS, and the Zip 250 does not work with ASPIPPM1.SYS. So, no Zip 250 on an 8088 machine.

Luckily, I have a V20 installed in my PCjr, so I can still use GUEST.EXE.

Although, now that I read back, I see you already discovered the ASPIPPM drivers wouldn't run on an 8088, so this was some kind of useless testing.

Oh well.

Yup, the Zip 250 definitely works with a V20.

Actually, I'd kind of like to get the ASPIDISK.SYS thing working. Can someone help me figure out why it's giving me the message "No SCSI logical drives to support."?

It does seem to see the adapter, just not the disk itself.

So, what does the entire setup look like again?

The ASPI driver that gets installed provides low level support for the specific SCSI adapter. While that is being initialized it should find the adapter, and then it should walk the SCSI chain to find any SCSI devices. If your SCSI devices are not being listed here, stop - you have a problem already.

After that, ASPIDISK (the Adaptec driver for removable storage) should be loaded. It should be able to talk to any ASPI driver and find any partitions on devices recognized by the ASPI driver. If you are getting "No Logical drives to support" it could be that the ASPI driver didn't find any SCSI devices on the chain, or that the devices are there but not partitioned. Usually there is a utility for partitioning removable SCSI devices supported by the ASPI driver - normal DOS FDISK won't work.

My setup is working perfectly with guest.exe - it just takes up more memory than I'd like.

I have ASPIPPM2.SYS loading first, then ASPIDISK.SYS immediately afterward.

ASPIDISK reports finding a device, but no partitions. I've tried the Adaptec AFDISK tool, but it just flashed "please wait" after I selected the ZIP drive, without doing anything.

Using guest.exe, the disk already appears formatted, and is assigned drive letter D.

An interesting thing I noticed: If you let guest.exe load ASPIPPM2.SYS after boot, the drivers take up a lot more memory than if ASPIPPM2 is loaded in config.sys.

I thought I might add - If I set the drive speed to 10, I get a lot of crashes related to the Zip drive not responding. I haven't had any crashes on speed 1 yet. I haven't tried anything in between, either, though. Seems to do better without the "Quiet" parameter, too.

I know this is an old thread, but I'm attempting to get this working on my own system.

I've used the palmzip demo driver successfully on my own system which has an NEC V20 and the standard parallel port sidecar that I've done the bidirectional mod on. After reading this thread I tried to get the ASPIPPM1.SYS/ASPIDISK.SYS driver working to no avail. The system hangs while booting. I'm using a patched DOS 5.0 boot disk with jrconfig.sys. Here's my config.sys file:

STACKS=0,0
DEVICE=JRCONFIG.SYS
DEVICE = ASPIPPM1.SYS FILE=BYTE.ILM SPEED=10
DEVICE = ASPIDISK.SYS /D

It hangs while loading the ASPIPPM1.SYS driver, either with FILE=BYTE.ILM or FILE=NIBBLE.ILM. I haven't tried the SPEED setting yet. Just curious what other people's experience was.