🚀 go-pugleaf

Phil Ryan, ryanpf@ssmd.mrl.dsto.gov.au writes:
> Has anyone got one of these 21 mb floptical drives working with OS/2?
> 
> I suspect that the SCSI card that I have (a 'Grassroots') will not work,
> and would be happy to get a new SCSI card if I knew that the floptical 
> would then work with OS/2. (Obviously, if there IS a driver, or a hack, 
> that makes the Grassroots controller work then I would prefer that.)

as you've found out the GrassRoots controller doesn't work under OS/2 and
I'm not aware of any hack to get it working. We didn't have to
investigate that option too much because we had already chosen an Adaptec
1542B controller to mate with our SCSI disk. When we were chasing this
issue up about a year ago I posted this in one of the news-groups:

> initial response from John Lloyd (jlloyd@adaptec.com)
> >As far as I know there is NOT complete support for the Insite
floptical at 
> >this time. I happen to have one installed right now and reading from
it is 
> >fine but writing is not possible. The support should probably be added
to 
> >OS2DASD.DMD or maybe a driver via OS2SCSI or OS2ASPI. 
> 
> being totally ignorant about OS/2 I then asked about the driver layers
> >I was only able to read the 20MB media. The files OS2DASD and OS2SCSI
are 
> >IBM files. OS2DASD is the manager of direct access storage devices
(i.e. 
> >floppies and hard drives) and sends requests to the ADD (adapter
device 
> >drivers) which communicate with the particular host adapters installed
> >in the system. Since floptical drives are a special kind of drive; they
> >support 
> >two media vastly different in their capacity, there must be some
control
> >at a level above the ADD. Currently this has not been implemented by
IBM 
> >(or anyone 
> >else that I know of). It could be done either in OS2DASD or by writing
a 
> >"filter" which would fit between the DMD and the ADD. We will probably
end up 
> >working on a solution with IBM. I cannot say when it will be because I
don't 
> >set the priorities.
> 
> I then asked why can't you write
> >In order to write to the floptical drive it must be unlocked. This is
done 
> >by sending a vendor specific mode select command. Once OS2DASD or a
"filter" 
> >learns to recognize floptical drives it will have to know when to send
these 
> >special commands.
> 
> so thanx to John for the replies. Unfortunately, the answer appears to
be
> incomplete support at present, OK if you want to read DOS-formatted
> flopticals. The driver layering requires some mods to use one both as a
> conventional floppy drive as well as a 20M removable but I assume that
the
> current driver(s) are insufficient to even use it solely as a 20M
> floptical, ie the last sentence in the quote immediately above. We
should
> be trying one in a month or so after we set up our first OS/2 system.

I don't know whether better support is now available - we replaced our
floptical drives with 128M MO ones, and found that CorelSCSI supported
these properly as removables. The Corel manual doesn't seem to mention
flopticals.

cheers,
Danny Thomas