Mark Willis (mwillis@nwlink.com)
Wed, 22 Apr 1998 10:41:42 -0700
Grant R. Guenther wrote:
>
> > As a DOS user (not yet a Linux user) of the ValueStor, I am pretty
> > darn certain that the last time I tried a pair of Seagate ST-3630A's in
> > my (newer) 90c26 VSMobile kit
>
> Hmm. This actually raises a related issue. The pd driver doesn't currently
> contemplate parallel port external cases with two IDE drives - mainly
> because until this mail, I'd never heard of one :-) I'll add support for
> dual drive cases to the end of my list.
>
> > (I didn't realize until later
> > that the 2nd drive was set as slave, so I'm pretty sure it was left as
> > slave!)
>
> If there are two drives on the same IDE cable, the second drive must be
> jumpered to slave. This is actually not quite the same issue as having
> a single drive jumpered as slave. There is more than just an addressing
> difference between the master and slave drives in IDE.
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Grant R. Guenther grant@torque.net
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
Well, I'm not TRYING, just managing, to confuse you here!
I haven't heard of dual IDE parallel port hard drive cases either;
What I was trying to communicate was that: I had not looked at the drive
jumpers accurately on those two ST3630A used drives; At 3 AM or so I
plugged one (the good one) into the 1-drive case, played with it, and
then, an hour later, the other (which screeched loudly - bad drive
bearings, and didn't FDisk at all; it DID nearly wake the dead!) into
my newer ValueStor (1-Drive only!) case; On the good drive (the first
one I tried) I fdisk'ed and formatted it, and only LATER, when I put it
into a desktop machine, saw that I had had it jumpered as slave, so the
Dos driver for the ValueStor case had recognized that drive, jumpered as
slave, as being present, and handled it just fine. I was rather
suprised once I noticed I'd managed to make THAT work!
Unless anyone else knows otherwise, I'd ask you to consider adding
slave drive (with no master present) support, if you want, even though
it's "wrong"! <G> Or maybe just probe for it (just tell the user,
"Mark, that drive's jumpered wrong, WAKE UP, drink some more coffee! Or
get some sleep first, & try again later!" <G>) I'm not sure there ARE
2-drive cases out there (I could try stacking 2 laptop drives in the
VSMobile cases, though - want me to try? I can only blow them up & void
the warranty, but the older one's old & I'd as soon have two new,
identical drive cases that behave the same, anyways <G> I'd not be
totally surprised if it worked, but I definitely doubt I could screw the
case closed!)
I do have another, older ValueStor 1-drive case as well, the
difference you can see from the outside is that the older unit has a
power switch on the back (daisy-chaining the two has worked for me,
also, in the past, though daisy-chaining with the VS CD-Rom parallel
port drive doesn't always work, so I try to keep it down to 1 drive at a
time.) The older unit's bolted together (I think it's the ?90c30?
chipset - I know it's a -different- chipset than the newer unit, and has
a different case (drive LED comes on just when the drive is accessed, it
likes the ME200.EXE Dos driver instead of the newer ME237.EXE Dos driver
usually.) The newer case isn't a 2-drive unit though.
Sorry if my (incoherent?) ramblings here confused you! <G> I'm a
little over-run, overworked, & so on (getting a lot done tho.)
Digesting too much new used hardware, I need to take the time to be
coherent, though!
Mark Willis
mwillis@nwlink.com
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b3 on Wed 30 Dec 1998 - 10:17:39 EST