From: "da Silva, Joe" 

Hi folks.

Just an update ...

Since I posted about this, I have learnt that USB flash
drives may be formatted in two ways :

1) Like a floppy disk ("removable" media), with just a
   boot sector at LBA=0.
2) Like a hard drive, with a partition table at LBA=0
   and a separate boot sector at LBA>0.

I have also learnt that the only driver combination that
would work for me (Panasonic's usbaspi 2.20 + DatOptic's
nj32disk 1.06), only seems to recognize #1.

All other driver combinations (including the popular
usbaspi + di1000dd) failed, typically "hanging" my PC.

However, recently I managed to find some more of the
Adaptec ASPI drivers, in an archive called 'dosdrvr.exe'
(just search the web, I can't find it at Adaptec's site).
Now I have a second driver combination that works for me :

Panasonic's usbaspi 2.20 + Adaptec's aspidisk 4.01b

This driver combination recognizes both #1 and #2 formats!
BTW, it uses about 5k additional RAM, but you'd expect it
to use a bit more, since it does more ...

I hope that's of some interest here.  :-)

I should also mention a totally different driver set,
dosusb + usbdisk, is partially successful for me, although
it still needs further development/debugging. However the
dosusb driver package intends to provide more general USB
support in DOS, not just "disk" drives. For more details,
see http://www.georgpotthast.de/usb/

Joe.


> -----Original Message-----
> From: shadow{at}shadowgard.com [mailto:shadow{at}shadowgard.com]
> Sent: Monday, 27 June 2005 7:36 PM
> To: opendos{at}delorie.com
> Subject: Re: Fun with USB
> 
> 
> On 27 Jun 2005 at 18:07, da Silva, Joe wrote:
> 
> > Well folks, over the weekend, I decided to experiment with
> > a bunch of USB and related drivers, on a Pentium II machine
> > with an Intel 440LX chipset, and one of those little USB
> > Flash drives. In pure DOS.
> > 
> > You may be interested to know that the experiment was a
> > success! I found two drivers that in combination, worked
> > with my hardware and provided me with what appeared a
> > normal hard drive. I could even run 'chkdsk' and 'scandisk'
> > on the USB Flash drive, and use long file names by using
> > Henrik Haftmann's 'doslfn' TSR. Most satisfactory.  :-)
> > 
> > For details on various drivers and URL's, please see :
> > http://www.computing.net/dos/wwwboard/forum/13447.html
> > 
> > This is all that I needed to add in my 'config.sys' to get
> > this "USB mass storage" stuff working in DOS :
> > 
> > REM - Panasonic's universal USB-controller driver (formerly Novac)
> > device=C:\ASPI_USB.DRV\PANASONC\USBASPI.SYS /v /w
> > REM - Workbit's ASPI mass storage driver for USB drives 
> (formerly Novac)
> > device=c:\ASPI_USB.DRV\datoptic\NJ32DISK.SYS
> > 
> > I tested this successfully on MS-DOS 7.10 (from W95B/C)
> > and DR-DOS 7.03. I also tried the same with DR DOS 6.0,
> > but without success.
> 
> Any idea if this will work on larger USB drives? Like my Iomega 80 
> gig and 250 gig drives? :-)
> 
> BTW, I haven't gotten around to it yet, but there are IDE to CF card 
> adapters available. I plan on seeing if I can set up a CF card as a 
> "read only" drive for some of my "dedicated"
MS-DOS boxes. All the 
> temp files and stuff can go on a RAM disk.
> 
> --
> Leonard Erickson (aka shadow)
> shadow at shadowgard dot com
> 
> 
> 



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