🚀 go-pugleaf

"Karl Frank" <ka...@karl.frank.name> wrote in message
news:965324301.645397@news.ainet.at...
> thehawk wrote:
> >>Not true. Harddrives don't need a driver.
> > True, hard drives do not need drivers.  However, if the controller they
are
> > plugged into happens to be something besides an IDE controller, then
your
> > DOS needs a driver in order to use that controller, and to see the
drives
> > plugged into it.
>
> Again, no - they don't.
> I had an Adaptec 2940, 2940U and 2940AU in my systems and _NONE_ needed
> a driver for the HDs to work. I don't have any IDE devices in there so
> I'd have a hard time booting my machine if you were correct...
> If course you need a driver to access CD drives or Zip drives. But the
> PCI card adds its own BIOS in the boot process, enough to work as long
> as only HDs are needed... I heared that only 2 HDs work wothut driver,
> but as I got 3 I can deny that rumor...
>

It all depends on your operating system, (or disk operating system), I work
on them all the time.  For example, all of our servers have Adaptec 2940's
of various flavors in them.  We use W2K Server as the operating system, and
we use Symantec Ghost (which is DOS based, as opposed to Windows based) to
create a disk image of them, so as to reduce the amount of reinstalls.  One
can NOT create an image of those drives without loading the ASPI drivers for
the controller card in the CONFIG.SYS first.

You are absolutely correct in that the SCSI controller has a BIOS, which
tells the machine itself how to work with the hardware, but it does not
necessarily tell your operating system how to work with it.  If that were
the case, then there would be no need for the whole "press F3 (or F6 I
think, depending on your flavor of windows) to load additional mass storage"
type drivers before you can install the NT based Windows operating systems.

I still have a system around here with an Adaptec 2940UW in it, which has
Red Hat on it at the moment.  I'll give it a format (and change the file
system back, and alla that) and see what happens and come back and talk some
more.

Our discussion aside, has Blah ever had the original question answered?  And
if so, what was the answer (I have looked thru the other branches of this
thread, and am not seeing if a resolution was reached)?

-thehawk