At 05:12 28-07-98 -0500, Jonathan Navarro wrote:

> ASUS P2L97-S, IBM UltraStar 2ES 4.5 Ultra Wide SCSI,
> 32X SCSI-2 cd-rom, 4X12 cd-writer SCSI-2... The motherboard comes
> with a 50 and 68 connectors, Adaptec 7880 SCSI controller on-board.
>
> 1.I'm planning to put the cd-writer and the cd-rom drive in the 50
>   pin SCSI-2 chain, terminated by the cd-writer. The SCSI-3 chain
>   terminated by the hard disk...can I have unused connectors between
>   the motherboard and the last SCSI device?


This is fine. And yes, you can have unused connectors between the
motherboard controller and the hard drive. What you must be sure to
do is keep the hard drive (termination enabled) at the last connector
of the wide ribbon cable. And be sure that the terminated CDR drive
is last on it's cable. The termination for the onboard controller
should be set for Automatic or manually as Low Byte off, High Byte on.
This is done from the SCSISelect BIOS setup (enter by pressing <Ctrl><A>
at boot).

The sum of the lengths of both SCSI cables should be less than 5 feet
if possible, for best results at ultra speeds.


> 2.Is that true that I have to physically low-level format the
>   SCSI hard disk in the BIOS?, then in the DOS define the partition
>   and format it again?  Maybe someone can tell me the typical
>   procedure to install a SCSI system.


No. You do not have to physically low level format the hard drive.
(This is done using a utility that is built into the SCSI BIOS, but it
is only rarely necessary.)

What you must do is boot with an MSDOS diskette and run FDISK. Create
a primary partition on the hard drive. Reboot. You should now be
able to see the hard drive as C:\. Now run FDISK again and set the
primary partition "active". Reboot again, just in case.

Again from MSDOS, FORMAT the hard drive using the S switch to transfer
system boot files to the drive: "Format C: /S". Reboot with no
diskette present. Hopefully you can now boot from the hard drive.

Run EZSCSI4 (Adaptec diskette), or download the DOS drivers beforehand
from <ftp://ftp.adaptec.com/pub/BBS/dos/dosdrvr.exe> and install them
manually. (Doing this manually is complicated.)

What I described will create a FAT16 primary partition that will be
limited to 2 GB in size. You then create an extended partition, and
fill it with logical drives to allow you use of the rest of the drive.

If you use a Win95b or Win98 install diskette to create a FAT32
partition, it can be up to 8 GB in size (the maximum for use with
Adaptec DOS drivers). But you may have trouble running the Adaptec
DOS drivers past 1024 cylinders. If you get stuck with an unusable
and uneraseable partition after trying this, that's when a low level
format might help. Prepare to have that take a couple of hours
(depending on how big your hard disk is) during which you may see no
apparent drive activity. Do not interrupt a low level format!

Regards,
Bill