*BSD News Article 58718


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From: tedm@central.com
Subject: Re: NCR810 SCSI help needed!
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Organization: Beaverton Location, Peter Norton Group
Message-ID: <DL0812.4zq@news.central.com>
References: <4cnmn0$dk8@access4.digex.net> <4cppdd$aj3@news.rrz.uni-koeln.de>
Date: Thu, 11 Jan 1996 06:43:48 GMT
Lines: 50

In <4cppdd$aj3@news.rrz.uni-koeln.de>, se@ZPR.Uni-Koeln.DE (Stefan Esser) writes:
>In article <4cnmn0$dk8@access4.digex.net>, dcmyers@access4.digex.net (David Myers) writes:
>|> 
>|> 
>|> 
>|> I picked up an NCR810-based SCSI controller the other day, and have been
>|> struggling with it ever since.  At 68 bucks, maybe I don't have any right
>|> to complain, but here's what's happening.  Any help would be greatly
>|> appreciated.
>
>I'm the current maintainer of the NCR SCSI code.
>And while it works just fine with just about every
>current hard disk drive, there are problems with 
>cheap CDROM drives, which seem to have a tendency
>to violate assumptions made in the driver ...

[delete]

>
>|> Background: 
>|> 
>|> Pentium/75 system with 16 megs of RAM, 4 PCI slots.  Quantum Fireball one
>|> gigabyte SCSI drive, NEC double-speed CDROM.  No IDE devices are present;

This might help:

A long time back I got a NEC 2x speed CD drive, model# CDR-55JD SCSI drive.
I am currently using it attached to a Future Domain 1660 card in a OS/2
workstation.

When I got the drive, the seller told me that this model of drive would NOT
work with any kind of Adaptec SCSI card.  Differences in the BIOS or whatever,
I don't know.

For a bit I used it in a Unixware 1.1 box, then later tried to use it in a
UX 2.X box, UX 2.x wouldn't recognize it.

Win95 doesen't recognize it either, I have to load the Future Domain DOS
driver for it.  In fact, Future Domain for a long time had specific separate
drivers for the lower-end NEC CDROM drives, until they eventually merged
them into their main DOS drivers.

I have this feeling that even if you do get your NCR card working, if your
CD is this model you may never get it running right because it is one of those
"odd" SCSI drives with a weird command set.

In any case, you can buy 4X speed surplus SCSI CD drives for $180 from
CSC, and 4x speed IDE cdrom drives from Surplus Software for the ~$150
range, so if you do end up with an oddball drive you might as well send it
to Stefan for him to take a look at and buy a newer drive.