There could be several causes for your problem, since SCSI cards can be of
several varieties.
First, is the drive visible in windows.  If the controller is recognizing
it, windows can load drivers to access the drive.  This would lead me to
believe the only way it will work in dos is to find a driver to load with
the device= statement in config.sys.  Generic drivers exist, which may or
may not work for your controller.
Second, the controller card may not support hard drives. This may or may not
be circumvented by loading a driver through the device= statement in
config.sys.  Ask again if you are not familiar with config.sys and how it
works.
Third, if it does support hard drives, it would probably be best to open the
BIOS configuration screen for the SCSI card and check around.  I have
installed controllers that shipped with dos drivers, but managed to work in
dos solely by the on controller bios anyway. So you might have luck just
changing a BIOS configuration setting or two on the controller. This is
USUALLY done by pressing a hot key during boot, like control-S for Adaptec
controller cards.  Typically the card is in the default mode for drive
support on, but if you got a used card this may be off.  As an additional
note, I have seen a couple SCSI cards that were only accessible with a
floppy, since the bios configuration screen programming code was in an
executable file and not part of the BIOS.  This is pretty rare as it
generally pertains to OEM cards that were shipped with a SCSI device and
have the configuration for that device (scanner, etc) pre-configured.

Last, the controller may not be recognizing the hard drive.  It is important
that the controller display some sort of boot message on the screen.  During
that procedure, you should see the hard drive in a device list.  Depending
on the bus the drive is connected via ribbon cable, the device list can be
7, 14, or more long.  If you don't see this list with the hard drive as a
listing, then the card is not working properly.  If the list does not
include the drive, then the controller's bios is improperly set or the drive
does not have the correct termination setting.  Because SCSI supports so
many device connections, the databus ribbon cable must be terminated to help
the controller identify the devices installed.  Termination is usually set
on the last device on the cable, but you can also use special termination
plugs.
Tom Turak

-----Original Message-----
From: Barry Pedersen [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Tuesday, November 25, 2003 1:19 PM

 I have a machine at home with Seagate 10GB SCSI drive and a BusLogis BT956c
PCI controller.  The drive is not visible from DOS, and Norton Speed Disk
will not defrag/optimize the drive.The boot drive is a separate IDE hard
disk.  These are the only 2 HDDs in the machine.The OS is Win98SE.  I'm
pretty sure the problem has something to do with drivers as I have not
loaded any software for it.  I just put in the pieces and ran it.  My
controller came from a discount website w/o any instructions or software, so
I'm not sure what to do.  I have some files from the web for this card that
are described as ROM binaries.  I don't know what that means or how to
install them.  There are two 65K files with extensions of .eve and .odd.
Can anyone offer some suggestions to fix this. Thanks for any help. -Barry

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