A question about ALL scsi systems..

[tom3]

Hi folks! I've got a question about going all scsi. If a system only had SCSI hard drives and a SCSI cd-rom drive, how would you go about doing a clean install?? With IDE, you could just boot off a floppy, fdisk, format the hard drive, then boot off the cd-rom running win98 cd then install.

Would scsi hard drives and cd-rom drives be recognized and accessible booting off a floppy disk?? I probably have to put on the floppy run time drivers for the scsi card and the cdrom drive and modify the autoexec and config.sys files right??

Is there an easier way?? How do you all scsi users do it??

 

[BoberFett]

I think the Win98 boot floopy has ASPI drivers on it.

 

[Shagga]

The boot disk that comes with Win98 will recognise the SCSI HD just the same as if it were IDE.

 

[tom3]

Does that only apply if the SCSI card has native DOS support??

 

[The Stigenator]

In an all SCSI system, if the SCSI interface is bootable then you can just plug in the 98 disk in the CDROM and it should boot like it does on an all IDE system.

 

[tom3]

hmmm i think i got somewhat of a idea on how to do this.. i'll give it a try without any IDE stuff installed.. i'll let you guys know how it goes..

thanks all of you!!

 

[12Guage]

If you're gonna use a Win98 boot disk to detect yout SCSI cd-rom make sure you've got an Adaptec controler card cuz that's all a Win98 boot disk supports.

If you want a scsi card that's at least as good as anything Adaptec makes, try somthing based on Symbios Logic chips. Adaptec makes a good card no doubt about that, but they do charge you for the name. (AMD vs INTEL of the SCSI world?) You would have to make your own boot disk with real mode drivers on it though. Autoexec.bat and Config.sys, don't worry about that , it's simple.

One suggestion about clean installs though, don't boot off the Win98 cd-rom. Boot from a floppy, format your hard disk, creat a directory ( call it wincab or somthing) and copy the contents of the Win98 directory on the CD to it. Change to the afore mentioned directory and run setup.
The install will be faster, cuz your hard disk is faster than your cd- rom drive, and Win98 will never again ask you to "Please insert the disk labled Win98 cd-rom"

 

[Pariah]

Make sure your SCSI card has a SCSI BIOS on it. If it does, your system will recognize the hard drive as if it was IDE. Put your 98 CD in the cdrom drive and during the SCSI card/devices initialization process, it should detect the bootable CD and you can install windows without ever having to hit the command prompt.

 

[PowerJoe]

All SCSI cards that can run a SCSI HD have a separate BIOS, which lets DOS see them as regular drives. Therefore, you should be able to boot from diskette and run FDISK/FORMAT as you normally would. As for CDROM support, your card may or may not support booting from your SCSI CDROM. If not, you'll have to figure out DOS drivers for it, or otherwise get the Win98 files onto your HD.

-PJ