USB HD vusuble in DOS?

[ldb]

I have a 320 GB My Book USB hard drive. This drive works well under windows, especially after I renamed the autorun.inf file which was causing some error messages. I would like to make this drive visible in DOS so I could use it for system backups. I have USB for legacy devices set to auto in BIOS.

Any other suggestions or drivers I could install to get this functioning?

Thanks

[dencorso]

Any other suggestions or drivers I could install to get this functioning?

Yes.

Get the Motto-Hairu driver (DI1000DD) here.

Get USBASPI.EXE here.

Set them in your config.sys as:

DEVICE=USBASPI.EXE /NORST /W
DEVICE=DI1000DD.SYS  /H0

Enjoy!

PS: There is some documentation on both drivers (from the time USBASPI was still USBASPI.SYS) in the attached zipped text file. By running USBASPI.EXE from the command line you should get some more info also.

USBASPI.zip

Edited March 22, 2009 by dencorso

[jaclaz]

Should for any reason the above be not working, try using this floppy:

http://johnson.tmfc.net/dos/usbdrv.html

to experiment with various drivers.

jaclaz

[ldb]

I got the drive to show up, thanks. I removed the switches from the devices and then realized that I had remarked out himem.sys and once I undid this, the drive showed up. Should I add back the switches, I have 2 USB ports on my computer.

My next problem is to get these drivers to load with the Acronis imaging software. I have created an Acronis boot disk which works perfectly by itself, but I believe it closes the session so I cannot add drivers to it. I think I might have to create another boot disk with CDrom support as the USB drive uses a drive letter of the CDrom which I do not have loaded in DOS.

I now have BIOS set to CDrom as 1st boot device and will probably have to change that to floppy. First I will load up USB drivers and then try and run the Acronis program from the CD. As this is a boot CD, I hope it does not restart the boot process and then I lose the USB driver.

I might also be able to put the USB driver files on a CD first and then create the Acronis boot disk on the same CD.

I might also be able to create the Acronis files on the USB HD and run it from there.

Any other suggestions accepted. My goal is to do my system backups on the USB HD and do any restores from there. I am now burning my backups on a single CDRW disk as the only one that works is the one that came with the drive.

[herbalist]

I'm not sure how the newer versions compare, but with version 7 you could make a Linux based rescue CD. I used to have Acronis 7 installed but found that the CD was sufficient for creating and restoring archives. On mine, the Acronis CD recognizes the external USB hard drive by itself. It works with both the built in USB 1 and the USB 2 PCI card. There was no need for any other drivers. Booting from the Acronis CD makes no changes to your system. Before you go through all that work, give the rescue CD a try. You might be pleasantly surprised.

Rick

[ldb]

Thanks Herbalist, that worked awesomely. I would not have thought of that. My version of Acronis is 8.0 and I did not get a lot of documentation as this was a free version given out by Acronis. The My Book partition showed up as drive D where it is normally drive K in Windows. I did a backup to the USB drive and was able to see it in the Acronis interface from the boot CD. This saved me a lot of fiddling around.