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Hello,
after two days of hard investigation on a old P4-1800 on Jetway P4XFA-Mobo with internal USB 1.0 and my new cheap external USB 2.0 Controller VIA 6212 connected to my new ICY-BOX IB351U, inside a Seagate 80 GB IDE-Disk, it works with MSDOS, especially Ghost 2003.
I tried following drivers under MSDOS 7:
ASPIEHCI.SYS V.13 (9 May 2003)+GUEST.exe
ASPIEHCI.SYS V.07 (23 Apr 2002)+GUEST.exe (delivered by Ghost)USBASPI.SYS 2.20 + DI1000DD.SYS
USBASPI.SYS 2.06 + DI1000DD.SYSDUSE 4.9
with alterning results - on one boot, it worked, on the next boot, it refused...
After all the following trials, for my environment, USBASPI 2.06 + DI1000DD seems to be the best.
To get reproducible results, I have to boot (Power-On or RESET-Switch, not CTRL-ALT-DEL !) with my rescue-cd (or boot-floppy), then, I have to wait until USBASPI wants me to plug in the disk, then I plug in then I press ENTER.
The last two days, I tried many things, Shadow-ROM/RAM off, Plug-Play on, disable internal USB and so on.
The only thing with my card is: the USB-Controller (better: the USBASPI.SYS ?) needs unshared IRQs.
I changed the PCI cards, so I found out, how my BIOS distributes the IRQs between the slots:
some slots are grouped to the same (then shared) IRQ, if a PCI-card wants more IRQs, BIOS shares them with the next slots/cards.The boot-up-messages from BIOS became my main information source: the card needs 3 IRQs, two for the 2 UHCI-Controller and 1 for the EHCI-Controller.
In all cases, the EHCI-Controller must have an unshared IRQ. One of the UHCI-Controllers now also gets such one, but I'm not sure if this is a must-be.
I got the worst results when the EHCI device shared the IRQ with an ethernet adapter which was connected to a network - no USB detection at all.
The other experience that helped me was: the controller (or whatever) needs a real hard reset (Power-On, RESET-Switch) before plug-in the USB-cable. So I wasted much time with CTRL-ALT-DEL. I assume that the driver needs a "fresh" interupt at initialization to detect the device.
For testing, I got the best results in removing all PCI-cards except the USB controller and disabling all "internal devices" (internal USB, even COM: and LPT:), so the controller really will get an unshared IRQ and then boot with a MSDOS floppy with a boot-menĂ¼ to select the drivers, first, without HIMEM, CD-driver a.s.o.
After that, I changed BIOS and config.sys step by step towards my usual environment, hit the RESET button and watched what happened. From time to time I switched off power - surprise: again it didn't work, ok, go back one step.
Here now my config.sys (USBASPIO = 2.06):
device=himem.sys /v
buffers=80,0
dos=high,umb
lastdrive=z
device=VIDE-CDD.SYS /D:MSCD_O /L:GR /P:170,15
device=USBASPIO.SYS /v /w /slow /e
device=DI1000DD.SYS
...other stuff...Hard to say: on my K8VX Athlon, UMBASPI worked immediately - even ASPIEHCI.SYS. In opposite to the P4-BIOS, K8VX initializes the internal USB 2.0 cards.
Maybe my experience of the last two days helps somebody in a comparable situation.

Why thankyou but see this is really aimed at Windows Ghost Users, if you search for posts on this forum by MADMAXUSB he has undertaken considerable testing of DOS USB.
VIA & ALi are not the most reliable of Chipsets on PCI Cards, NEC Chipsets seem to give less errors and conflicts.
Also if you list the USB ASPI etc as first lines in CONFIG.SYS you usually get less errors.
Personally prefer Acronis True Image which is Linux based and therefore has more mature USB Support.
If anyone wishes to try the Panasonic I have found a basic boot disk here, it is a Windows Self Extracting WinImage:
http:83.67.55.228/USBCDROM.EXE

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