NightOwl wrote on Sep 11^th, 2005 at 11:23am:


nightowl,
here is a link of where i read about switches on DI1000dd.sys
http://www.computing.net/dos/wwwboard/forum/15085.html

about zoro's suggestion, did you mean that i try not loading the himem.sys?

Many thanks for such a great post.  It has taken me days (on and off) to get through all the discussions and links.

I am running a generic 2.0 USB enclosure on a WD 250Gb harddrive.  The system is a Asus P4GE-MX running a 2.4 GHz Celeron.  I tried to figure out the manufacture of the USB control on the MB and was not able to do so.  I also have a Ali 2.0 card in the system. 

I have seen some discussion about transfer rates and I still feel that the rates are unacceptable. 

The system didn't really need any special drivers to be able to boot from and/or talk to the USB External drive.  However, when I first tested Ghost under this configuration, Ghost indicated that it was averaging 60 MB/min or 1MB/sec.  When directly connected to the IDE bus, 1000 MB/Min transfer rates were seen, so I at least assume that is the best I would ever do due to some sort of limitation of the bus.

After reading this post, I was confident I had to be able to do better.  I tried the Ghost Iomega boot disk configurations with IBMDOS and MSDOS and could never get the system to see the External USB hardrive.  I also tried DUSE and had the same issues.

Tonight, I tried the Panasonic driver with the *motto haru* driver.  All the drives were recognized and assigned new drive letters.  The "normal" system recognization of the External USB Harddrive was also still seen and assigned a drive letter, by these drives were not usable.

In testing Ghost 2003 with this new configuration, I was able to get a sustained transfer rate of up to 170 MB/min.  This is still substantially slower than the maximum transfer rate possible with USB 2.0 of 3600 MB/min and I still remain confused as to what I can do to speed things up.  Obviously, the Panasonic driver is better than the built-in BIOS recognization of the USB device.

It would be appreciated if any recommendations could be made as to how to speed up the transfer rate to the External USB device.  Also, forgot to mention... whether connected to the USB bus on the MB or the Ali card, the results are the same.

Quote:


hi nightowl
i have tested the enclosures with the Panasonic USB drivers on a different system/desktop, and guess what......

it didnt work too!

oh well....

The results are in but before I share a success story here.  Among my searching this is the only forum that has provided such information regarding this topic.  This should be made into a PDF and posted for D/L ...

I successfully identified in dos TWIN (2 identical) Maxtor One Touch II 300GB External USB 2.0 HDDs  using the USBASPI.SYS  v2.20 controller and the DI1000DD.SYS driver.  

Both HDDs are partitioned in half as NTFS.  (286,188MB total or 143,000something each partition)

Note: these drives have ONLY 1 USB port each.  No Firewire or Cat 5 or 6 link

This worked on two different setups:

# 1. Compaq Presario Notebook, P4 2.0Ghz, 752meg RAM, 2 USB ports out the back.

(this next one will make you cry; I do...)

# 2. HP Pavilion Desktop, P3 900Mhz ("overclocked" to 1.0 Ghz), 256meg RAM, using a BELKIN PCI USB card.

IN GHOST

setup 1

Using the # 1. setup I created an image of Disk 1, partion 2 ( 1:2 ) onto Disk 2, partition 2 ( 2:2 ).  I used FAST compression...

The total time was 5hrs 20mins.  The average speed was 400 MB/minute or 6.66 MB/second...  I read previously someone got around 550MB/minute and liked the prospects but I shouldn't complain.  The ability to even identify these drives with dos is amazing...

setup 2

Using # 2 setup I am currently checking the image integrity at 600 MB/minute or 10 MB/second.  I wanted to use the Desktop just to test the PCI card.

I am still curious, would the drivers that come with drives on cd work under dos?  Doubtfully, but still asking...

This is the end of a 25-hour road of reading forum after forum.  

A few more questions:

Having two external HDDs of such capactity (4 partitions all roughly 143 GB) there is a lot freedom for me explore more efficeint storage practices.  I use HDD 1 as a regular/everyday HDD connected to my Desktop in which I keep my music, photos, and the such.  I use HDD 2 as a backup of HDD 1, my desktop, and my laptop.

1. Is it "better" to have HDD 1 formatted as NTFS vs. others?

2. Can I gain any performance during a ghost backup or file integrity if I format HDD 2 as something other than NTFS?

3. In accessing HDD 1 daily, is it possible to keep these files encrypted without a lot of time consuming processing?

Thanks NightOwl...

I do not know much about drivers and did not know if they were sometimes restricted to a specific os environment (ie: a driver only usable with a particular version of windows)

I will give that a go too.  Again if there is success I will share...

Hi all,

First time posting, just wanted to thank all the moderators for the great work & info.

I have recently used nightOwl's Panasonic drivers on my wife's Dell WinXP SP2 laptop to do a Disk Image. I was able to create the image, and successfully verified the image (for specs and transfer speed, see below). However, when I booted it up, my wife noticed that the wireless network settings that were previously saved, are now gone. I verified this, as I had to re-enter my wifi network's WEP key to reconnect to my home network.

In addition, she also noticed that when she mouses over the wifi mgr icon in the system tray, it says "Windows is managing this device" and the icon is white instead of the usual green.

Today (3 days after the disk image) she called me from school and said she got a blue screen. Rebooted and it looked to be ok. I'll have to wait til she gets home to check it.

When I created the Disk Image, I saw that there was a Dell partition that I did not know existed. I wonder if this is where they store the config data and somehow this was not copied over entirely?

I realize that this would be strange for a computer to be modified b/c of CREATING an image, not RESTORING an image, but I thought I would check in case. It's important for the laptop to stay up as we're in the thick of 1st year law school (which is why I created the ghost image in the first place! ) so I didn't want to try anything else without doing some research first.

I tried searching for answers to the above, but got nowhere, so was wondering if any of the moderators/posters with their wealth of knowledge might have heard something like this. Thanks for any assistance!

Specs:

Dell Inspiron 600m Laptop w/ WinXP SP2
40 GB HD, ~10 GB used

External USB HD: USB 2.0 80GB Maxtor Personal Storage 3100
Transfer speed: ~333 MB/min

pbnj,

did you retore an image or simply create one? creating an image shouldn't affect anything with system configuration.

http://www.goodells.net/dellutility/