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From: hua@netcom.com (Ernest Hua)
Subject: Iomega QIC-80 + Dell XPS P90 + FreeBSD 1.1.5.1
Message-ID: <huaCysBnD.F0v@netcom.com>
Keywords: dell tape qic-80 freebsd
Organization: NETCOM On-line Communication Services (408 261-4700 guest)
Date: Sat, 5 Nov 1994 08:01:58 GMT
Lines: 33
I have a Dell Dimension XPS P90 PCI system with a 1.44M floppy. The
floppy controller appears to be on-board. The setup menu appears to
be able to do choose which physical drive appears as drive A: to the
operating system. It appears to be able to fool FreeBSD as well as
MS-DOS, so I suspect this is a hardware-based redirection, probably
swapping the register windows at 0x3f8 and 0x2f8.
My main problem is that a Conner QIC-80 tape drive worked with some
other PC (a 486DX2-66 with the floppy controller on a BT445S SCSI
controller), but it did not work with the Dell system. ("work" here
means that FreeBSD 1.1.5.1 actually found the drive as ft0.) I gave
up on the Conner and traded for an Iomega QIC-80 drive hoping that
some funny drive select limitation was the problem with the Conner.
Turns out, I was wrong. The Iomega is also invisible to FreeBSD.
I should also point out that both drives worked with the software as
delivered for DOS/Windows. Both drives were configured with the so-
called "soft" drive select jumper. (When I tried configuring the
Conner explicitly as drive 1 or as drive 2, it floppy would appear
to be waking up at the same time as the tape drive. I suspect that
there is some sort of conflict of drive address or something.)
A interesting fact is that the Dell documentation warned that one
should set the drive select to "DS4" and not "DS2" or "DS3". I did
not do this because there was no way to do so in either tape drive.
Anyone have a clue as to what is going on here?
All comments or suggestions are welcome.
Ernest Hua
Xenon Microsystems
hua@netcom.com