Friday, August 27, 2010

Yes, there are usb drivers for dos… – The Inquir

Yes, there are usb drivers for dos… – The Inquir

Now the hairy details for DOS old-timers like myself who actually enjoy editing config.sys [Cough. Ed.]:

The driver switches you can use are: device=(path)USBASPI.SYS ] /r]

 

/w Wait,supercard one, displays text message for attaching or swapping USB devices

/v Verbose, shows status messages – recommended

/l LUN,r4i revolution sdhc, specifies highest LUN # to be attached to device ID (default=0)

Example config.sys and autoexec.bat files on a DOS boot diskette with USB support for an usb cd-(rom/rw) and hard
disk look like this:

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. You can’t do it. Or if your wife/husband
has managed to mess up her/his system so badly that it can’t boot anymore,high power green laser, yet she/he wants you to have a copy of those
nice digital pictures stored on a compactflash card plugged into the compactflash reader?. No way, Jose. Not from DOS,
used to be the phrase.



DOS=HIGH,portable solar chargers,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 one loads CD-ROM driver

devicehigh=USBCD.SYS /d:USBCD001

The INQUIRER – unfair, unbalanced



@echo off

REM the following line adds a drive letter to the usb cd(rom/r/rw) mounted

LH MSCDEX /d:USBCD001

 

Before you start scratching your head, let me repeat that this is not related to your favorite linux distro’s or
Windows XP/W2K/98/ME’s USB support, this has to do with people like me,ps3 gaming headset, booting some flavor of DOS to copy files around
or using DOS-based partition back-up software.

The driver scans all three USB controller specs by default, but you can limit which controllers are enabled using
these switches:

L’INQs

Panasonic v2.06 ASPI
Manager for USB mass storage

USBASPI.SYS

(Look for the “F2H” subdirectory after extraction of the downloaded archive)

FTP site: Motto Hairu Mass Storage ASPI
drivers

However, it should be noted that this driver will only map mass storage devices like external hard disks, cd- roms, cd-rw, dvd-rom, zip, jaz, ls-120,freedom bluetooth keyboard, and flash memory to
ASPI devices. Then you need an elusive “ASPI mass storage driver” to map HDs and flash disks it to a drive letter in
DOS. This one goes by the name “di1000dd.sys”,phone watch with camera, commonly referred to as the “Motto Hairu USB Driver”. Don’t ask why,cheap china phones,
it’s called that,iphone cover, I don’t know.

Well, now you CAN.

Before you continue reading and decide to go out and do “bad things” let me mention that legalese on the Panasonic
site most probably prevents you from downloading and using this driver on non-Panasonic devices, yet according to
reports that are floating around on the Interweb, people have been able to use these “universal drivers” on a wide
range of systems with different USB connectivity, UHCI,android mobile phones, OHCI, and USB 2.0’s EHCI with the NEC chipset.

The Panasonic driver also seems to recognise some TI cardbus controllers, making it possible to use USB peripherals
attached to USB (even 2.0!) Cardbus cards. Your mileage might vary. Knowledge of the Japanese language might be
required to read and understand the Panasonic licence agreement or the cease-and-desist letters. Explore at your own
risk.

And so far I learned what these switches mean:

Comments? Drop me a line here. ?

The minor miracle here is using a driver file called “USBASPI.SYS” (”Panasonic v2.06 ASPI Manager for USB mass
storage”). Given the right parameter incantations, this 16-bit Panasonic-developed DOS driver will let your system boot
good-old DOS -any flavour,ds one, maybe even Caldera’s OpenDOS and recognize all USB devices connected to the respective controllers. So this USB device identification is also useful for
debugging/troubleshooting purposes.

/e EHCI spec (USB 2.0)

/o OHCI spec (newer USB 1.x)

/u UHCI spec (older USB 1.x)

HAVING AN EXTERNAL USB cd-writer or hard disk works wonders as long as your operating system is in good shape.
But if someday the system stops booting, you are lost. Booting from good old MS-DOS or Windows boot diskettes – even
fitted with the needed third party NTFSDOS or EXTFS drivers – gives you access to your fixed hard disk only,32gb micro card, but none
of the USB peripherals can be accessed from the DOS command line.

The Panasonic DOS drivers seem to work on most USB chipset implementations, including Intel and NEC, as well as
NVidia, VIA, and SIS. It seems Panasonic engineers didn’t want to have to write a driver every time for every different
chipset, so they wrote this “universal” driver to work with all possible USB controllers.

 

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