Looking for Info/Drivers for Old Magneto-Optical Drive

Hello,

I am looking for any information and/or drivers for an old magneto-
optical SCSI drive I have found in our storage. It's manufactured by
"R-Squared", and does not seem to have a model name/number on it.
Unfortunately, I can only find blurbs of the company on Google. It
appears to have a SCSI-2 interface. Can anyone point me in the right
direction for this drive?

Thanks,

Lint

>I am looking for any information and/or drivers for an old magneto-
>optical SCSI drive I have found in our storage. It's manufactured by
>"R-Squared"

I have several optical drives and the name on the case is usually
the reseller/VAR, not the original mfgr.
Best is to hook it up to a SCSI controller and
get the ID, mfgr info, etc from the controller's BIOS.

If you're not already running Linux,
perhaps try a "live linux" CD/DVD
so you can try the SCSI utilities.
Just looking at /proc/scsi and
/var/log/messages reveals a lot about all the peripherals.

scanomatic@forwardbounding.com wrote:
>
> I am looking for any information and/or drivers for an old magneto-
> optical SCSI drive I have found in our storage. It's manufactured by
> "R-Squared", and does not seem to have a model name/number on it.
> Unfortunately, I can only find blurbs of the company on Google. It
> appears to have a SCSI-2 interface. Can anyone point me in the right
> direction for this drive?

Maybe you don't need any drivers. Some of the older MO media have the
same 512Byte Blocksize as harddisks and if the drive identify itself as
"direct access" it should be able to use it with generic SCSI disk
drivers.


Micha

On Sun, 9 Mar 2008 19:06:12 -0700 (PDT),
scanomatic@forwardbounding.com wrote:

>Hello,
>
>I am looking for any information and/or drivers for an old magneto-
>optical SCSI drive I have found in our storage. It's manufactured by
>"R-Squared", and does not seem to have a model name/number on it.
>Unfortunately, I can only find blurbs of the company on Google. It
>appears to have a SCSI-2 interface. Can anyone point me in the right
>direction for this drive?
>
>Thanks,
>
>Lint
I would first connect it and try a cartridge. Never needed a
driver for multiple types of these drives.

The only driver I ever required was under W98SE and for using
both 512 and 2048 media in the same session.

On Mar 10, 11:43 am, Splork <spl...@splork.net> wrote:
> On Sun, 9 Mar 2008 19:06:12 -0700 (PDT),
>
> scanoma...@forwardbounding.com wrote:
> >Hello,
>
> >I am looking for any information and/or drivers for an old magneto-
> >optical SCSI drive I have found in our storage. It's manufactured by
> >"R-Squared", and does not seem to have a model name/number on it.
> >Unfortunately, I can only find blurbs of the company on Google. It
> >appears to have a SCSI-2 interface. Can anyone point me in the right
> >direction for this drive?
>
> >Thanks,
>
> >Lint
>
> I would first connect it and try a cartridge. Never needed a
> driver for multiple types of these drives.
>
> The only driver I ever required was under W98SE and for using
> both 512 and 2048 media in the same session.

Being a former owner of the company R-Squared I can tell you for a
fact that we didn't make the drive - we just ******* it into a box.
Most likely it is a Sony drive. Probably the Sony 501. You should be
able to hook it up to a SCSI HBA and send an INQUIRY command to it to
see what manufacturer and product it is. Most SCSI cards have a power
on bios that you can enter before your system boots - there is usually
a function there to scan the bus and display that info for the devices
that are found.

Once you find the manufacturer and model product number you can track
down a manual for it on the web. I seem to remember that there was a
dip switch on those drives that allowed you to set the device type
reported by the inquiry command to either report it as a generic "type
0" random access disk, or to report that it is an optical disk.
Setting this to report type 0 should be the easiest way to get Windows
happy with it - it will just see it as a regular disk drive.

If you are going to want to use it under Windows then you will want to
get 512 byte/sector media for it. You can get media in various block
sizes.

I think you'll find that if it still works it will be a very slow
device!

Good luck!