Setting up USB for DOS
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Setting up USB drivers for DOS
Having an external USB cd-writer or hard disk is pretty handy.. as long as
your Windows operating system is in good shape. But if someday the system stops
booting, you can be screwed. Booting from
DOS boot diskettes or
Windows boot diskettes, even
fitted with third-party NTFSDOS or EXTFS drivers, gives you
access to your fixed hard disk only, but none of the USB peripherals can be
accessed from DOS
Imagine that you want to use Paragon Drive Backup, Powerquest's Drive Image, or Norton Ghost, to backup your hard disk partitions to that nice 120gb external USB 2.0 hard disk you just bought. With just a standard DOS boot diskette, you could not do it.
DOS-based USB driver are required to be able to access these peripherals. One such driver is usbaspi.sys, the Panasonic ASPI Manager for USB mass storage. Given the right parameter incantations, this 16-bit DOS driver will let your system use an standard DOS boot disk and recognize all USB devices connected to the respective controllers. So this USB device identification is also useful for debugging or troubleshooting purposes.
However, it should be noted that this driver will only map mass storage devices like external hard drives, cd-roms, Iomega zip drives, jaz-drives, ls-120-drives, and flash memory to ASPI devices. You also need an "ASPI mass storage driver" to map hard drives to a drive letter in DOS. This one goes by the name di1000dd.sys, commonly referred to as the "Motto Hairu USB Driver".
Both the Panasonic ASPI Manager and the Motto Hairu USB driver can be downloaded HERE.
According to reports floating around, most people have been able to use these universal drivers on a wide range of systems with different USB connectivity, UHCI, OHCI, and USB 2.0's EHCI with the NEC chipset.
As far as the details for editing the config.sys, the driver switches you can use are:
device=(path)\USBASPI.SYS [/e] [/o] [/u] [/w] [/v] [/l[=n]] [/f] /r] [/slow] [/nocbc] [/norst] [/noprt]
The driver scans all three USB controller specs by default, but you can limit which controllers are enabled using these switches:
- /e EHCI spec (USB 2.0)
- /o OHCI spec (newer USB 1.x)
- /u UHCI spec (older USB 1.x)
Basic Switches:
- /w Wait, displays text message for attaching or swapping USB devices
- /v Verbose, shows status messages - recommended
- /l[=n] LUN Specifies highest LUN # to be attached to device ID (default=0)
Example config.sys
DOS=HIGH,UMB lastdrive=Z device=HIMEM.SYS REM The following line loads Panasonic's universal USB- controller driver devicehigh=USBASPI.SYS /v /w /e REM the following is an aspi mass storage driver for usb- connected HDs and compactflash memory cards devicehigh=DI1000DD.SYS REM The following line loads an optional CD-ROM driver devicehigh=USBCD.SYS /d:USBCD001
Example autoexec.bat
@echo off REM the following line adds a drive letter to the usb cd(rom/r/rw) mounted LH MSCDEX /d:USBCD001
The Panasonic driver also seems to recognise some TI cardbus controllers, making it possible to use USB peripherals attached to USB Cardbus cards, even USB 2.0. Explore at your own risk.
