FireWire Drivers

Computers

FireWire DOS Drivers?

Summitlake.com Correspondence

This thread is discontinued.

NOTE: reader responses suggest that DOS Drivers for FireWire is still a very experimental area. The methods shared on this page worked for the contributors, but this is no guarantee they will work for others. If you are not comfortable with DOS and not willing to risk a big time investment in getting a reliable DOS path to a FireWire drive, stop right here.

Please don't write me personally for advice on this topic, as I was unable to even get my FireWire bridge to work with my motherboard under Windows. I am only a spectator on this topic. Post your inquiry on YaBB, or, send it to me and I will re-post your inquiry as time permits.

Alex 5/20/2003

December 29, 2002

DOS Instructions for supporting Firewire DOS Driver!

Response to the December 1 posting has been overwhelming. Frank has kindly sent us additional instructions for modifying autoexec.bat and config.sys so that the DOS driver will work on the DOS level:

To use the firewire-devices with DOS,
perform the following steps:

1) Create a Ghost-Bootdisk with Ghost 2003 (without any driver-support)

2) Then modify with an editor:

2.1) Autoexec.bat as follows:
@echo off
SET TZ=GHO-01:00
GHOST.EXE

2.2) Config.sys as follows* :
device=himem.sys
device=Sbp2aspi.sys
device=Nj32disk.sys
LASTDRIVE=Z

Note: All the drivers must be copied into the root directory (of the Ghost boot disk). The ghost-file in this example is in the root-directory too.

* On some PC's there may be a "A20 Gate" Problem in the upper memory, when using the firewire driver. Adding the HIMEM command (1/17/03) addresses this. Add all entries in the order shown.

Thank you very very much for your help and assistance.

Frank

December 1, 2002

Thanks, Frank!

On Sun, 1 Dec 2002 11:39:44 +0100, Frank Mühlen wrote:

I found a firewire dos driver!!!!

http://www.datoptic.com/fw25.html

On this site you find DOS drivers!

I use the drivers with "ghost2003 + pc-dos" and my external firewire harddrive "maxtor personal storage 5000DV". I think it works with older ghost versions and different external firewire devices too.

it works PERFECT to create images from my laptop harddrive.

Be happy!

You may post this on your site.

Greetings from Germany,

Frank

May 26, 2002

Hi Dave,

I did a Google search on "FireWire DOS driver". The results were not encouraging. More questions than answers at www.computing.net/dos/wwwboard/forum/9958.html. Some third party solutions may exist at the device level, like LaCie, but apparently not for Pyro. A better solution would be at the adapter controller level. I tried Adaptec (since I have their DuoConnect PCI card installed, not the Pyro card).

Adaptec offers drivers for W2000 or WinXP on the USB2.0 side, but no mention of a FireWire driver.

Even if and when a driver is written, there's a strong smell of yet another "driver dependency" issue here. Users like ourselves wait months for support, dedicate hours upon hours into setting up a "perfect backup" scheme, and then a weakest link in the chain fails. Usually, that weakest link is the driver itself, when a minor OS update is installed or some other driver conflict develops. I went through all this with Apple devices years ago. :(

Looking at where the device drivers are being written, and how PC World and PC Magazine are splashing articles on USB2.0 with hardly a mention of IEEE1394, it seems industry insiders would prefer to leave IEEE1394 as a legacy Apple and VideoCam solution.

This whole business of truly portable drive solutions seems to have been forgotten. Putting all your MP3 or WMA files on portable storage is glitzy, and can be done within the OS without DOS drivers. How many people actually spend money to support HD volume backups on a regular basis? My call: we're a fringe market and always will be.

The initial investment for my DataPort removable HD cartridge solution is actually cheaper than the Pyro approach, 100% reliable because it's a pure IDE solution, and fast - drive to drive Ghost copies are copying 27GB of actual content from 100GB HD A to B in about 13 minutes. Of course, this is no good for notebooks or other machines that don't have empty 5-1/2" HD bays.

Good luck to you!

Alex

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