DOS Ultra33 DMA Drivers for AX6B 440BX PII motherboard?

[jtr1962]

My current "best" machine is a PII-450 running on an AX6B M/B(440BX chipset). DMA33 transfers work fine in Windows, but not in DOS. Yes, they are set in the CMOS but apparently that doesn't make them active unless the appropriate driver is loaded.

Why do I even care if I have Ultra33 transfers in DOS? The reason is because when Windows crashes and restarts(which can be quite often when I'm playing with the buggy Route Editor in MS TrainSim, or using good old IE), the stupid Scandisk routine takes about 20 times as long to complete as it would under Windows. I know I can stop it, but I always let it run just in case something is amiss from the last crash. My older machine, a 200 MHz Pentium, doesn't exhibit this problem. In that machine I have a Promise Ultra33 card which has DMA transfers enabled all the time by default, and the DOS scandisk is only slightly slower than the Windows version(slower because the 32-bit drivers aren't loaded in a pure DOS environment). Benchmarking under pure DOS gives me buffer-to-host transfer rates of ~30 MB/sec in the older machine and ~10 MB/sec in the PII, but the PII feels much slower than those numbers would indicate. I'm just tired of having the machine sidelined for up to an hour each time it crashes doing a scandisk. I have two hard disks, 4 partitions total, and something like 160,000 files, so just checking the file system on all the partitions(which happens if I changed even one thing on each of them), not even doing a surface scan, can take that long. It takes ~6 minutes to do it under Windows. Thankfully scandisk doesn't do a surface scan after Windows crashes, or the machine would be sidelined all day! My 100GB Maxtor takes a few hours for that even under Windows.

I have searched high and low to no avail for DOS DMA drivers, and I can't believe this isn't something that people never asked for given Windows propensity for crashing and then restarting with the famous scandisk program.

 

[Tannin]

I don't think your problem is DTR, JTR. I think it's memory management. Sounds to me like you have too little base (<640lk) RAM free. Experiment with adding HIMEM.SYS to your CONFIG.SYS, cleaning out any memory hogs (Drivespace is the worst of them, but by no means the only one) and a few of the other old-school tricks. (Which I can't remember right now but could if pressed.)

Err ... try:

device=c:\windows=emm386.exe noems novcpi

 

[jtr1962]

I don't think your problem is DTR, JTR. I think it's memory management. Sounds to me like you have too little base (<640lk) RAM free. Experiment with adding HIMEM.SYS to your CONFIG.SYS, cleaning out any memory hogs (Drivespace is the worst of them, but by no means the only one) and a few of the other old-school tricks. (Which I can't remember right now but could if pressed.)

Err ... try:

device=c:\windows=emm386.exe noems novcpi

Thanks for the tip, but I know those tricks like the back of my hand. Don't forget, I got started on PCs with a 386-40 in 1999, so I had to learn all that. I've gotten as much as 635K free with QEMM and DOS 5.0 on my 386. The machine I'm asking about has around 623K free in pure DOS mode with HIMEM.SYS and ~630K free with QEMM9.0(I can boot into 8 different configurations-various combinations of QEMM/HIMEM/EMS/CD drivers loaded). Drivespace is disabled(it hogs over 100K of memory, awful program!), and everything else(just mouse and CD drivers) is loaded high. When I use QEMM it only sees 256MB of my 768MB, but that should be adequate for scandisk many times over.

I certainly may be wrong that the problem is DTR, but if not, then what is it? Certainly not lack of processing power, since my slower machine works way faster doing a DOS scandisk. Maybe I'm at close to 100% CPU utililization for disk transfers under DOS since it's not DMA, and because of that the actual disk checking routines have few spare CPU cycles to run?

P.S. Nice to know I'm not the only one here familiar with archaic DOS memory management techniques, and I still use a few DOS programs on a regular basis just because I haven't found anything newer that works better. My PCB design program, Protel Autotrax, tops that list. I thought I wasn't going to be able to run it on my PII because of no suitable video driver(except VGA-ugh), but today I found some nice VESA drivers that let me go up to 1200x1600. Apparently there are a number of people still regularly using this 10-year old program.

 

[CougTek]

Don't forget, I got started on PCs with a 386-40 in 1999, so I had to learn all that.

Shouldn't that be 1989?

 

[jtr1962]

Don't forget, I got started on PCs with a 386-40 in 1999, so I had to learn all that.

Shouldn't that be 1989?

No. It was second hand. In fact, until the 386 came out, I really didn't consider PCs to be anything more than expensive toys which were pretty limited in what they could do. The 386 was powerful enough that you could do a fair bit of useful stuff on it. The problem was, at the time it came out, I didn't have $4,000 to spend on a machine, so I didn't bother. I ended up with a friend's second hand 386-33 in 1999, when it was no longer of any use in his business. Prior to that, the only thing I needed to do on a computer was design circuit boards, and I just used to go to my friend's place of business and use his PC after working hours. Amazingly, he ran a business with that computer until 1999, and then found that some of the newer software he needed required Windows 98, which just plain wouldn't run on a 386-33. Win95 does, and if you have 32MB of RAM, it's even tolerable, but that machine was maxed out at 8 MB(it had a provision for another 8 MB in a memory expansion card, but I had no idea of where to buy one). After having that PC for a few months, another friend gave me his 386-40, which I maxed out at 32 MB. I used that machine for over a year, and then got a Pentium case and M/B for $5 which I added a processor and 128 MB of RAM. I alternate between that machine and the PII, which I got from the same guy who gave me the 386-40 in return for doing a few projects. Over the last few years, I've spend maybe $2,000 total on my computer hobby, and about half of that was for RAM and hard drives. I like a lot of storage-my 386-40 has 9.7 GB total, the Pentium 39.5 GB, and the PII 140 GB. Storage and RAM as of late have gotten stupidly cheap, to the point that everyone can afford far more of both than they will likely use. BTW, the Route Editor of MS Train Sim actually does need and use most of the 768 MB of RAM that the PII has.

 

[blakerwry]

sorry to dig this up, but if it;s of interest, using smart drive (i believe that's what it was called) will act as a great disk cache and will leterally speed things up double for random read/writes in DOS (just my observation)


just load it in your config.sys I believe

 

[jtr1962]

Thanks for the tip. Believe it or not, I was finally able to dig something up. I found out on one site that something called the Trione V. 3.60 DMA driver would do what I wanted, but wasn't able to find it. A few days ago, I did find it at http://www2.driverguide.com/files7315/uploads3/2361/TRIONES.ZIP.

My STRs in DOS went from ~10 MB/sec to 32 MB/sec. Unfortunately, the driver is only suitable for running in pure DOS mode. If I try to boot into Windows with the driver loaded my hard drives remain in MS-DOS compatibility mode, so I just made another configuration entry in my config.sys for loading the DMA driver but kept the default configuration without it. When I do something in pure DOS, I load the driver, otherwise I use the standard Windows DMA drivers.

 

[time]

That's highly interesting, Jtr1962. Have you tried Ghost or some other DOS imaging utility to see what effect the driver has?

 

[jtr1962]

I haven't done extensive testing yet. The driver doesn't seem to have much effect when the DOS version of Norton Disk Doctor is running, but this is a hopelessly bloated program, and much of the directory scanning appears to be processor intensive. The older version of Disk Doctor that came with NU 8.0 seems to scan directories faster on my 386(with ISA bus IDE!) than the newer version does on my PII. Unfortunately, the older version can't deal with FAT32 or long file names. I'll try scandisk and some file transfers with and without the driver to see if it makes much difference. With over 3X the STR, I should notice the difference with any software that requires extensive disk I/O.

An interesting tidbit here is that the DOS NDD takes about two minutes to scan the directories on my C: partition, while the Windows version does it in about 10 seconds. There's something more accounting for the difference than just STRs.