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Jaz SCSI Card in a Windows PC?

Tom2112

Well-known member
I happened to pick up a pair of internal Jaz drives that each came with a PCI SCSI card. The SCSI cards are Iomega branded, model ABP-960U and have an AdvanSys ASC3050B chipset.

Unfortunately, I can't find any drivers for these cards for Windows 10. Does anyone here know if they can be made to work in Win10? I'd rather not setup an old Windows system just to use them.

Thanks in advance,
Tom
 

chelseayr

Well-known member
tom I was curious and looked up, seem it was originally made by adaptec. and adaptec themselves not surprisingly has officially stated that anything pre-sas has no win10 support at all (with a small footnote that some U160/U320 may work via win7/8 drivers)

as a footnote the jaz drive should probably likely work with the proper adapter to a rather newer U320 card if not a sas-scsi adapter from any budgetary sas card. but I'll leave it to someone else to expand this topic further onward
 

NJRoadfan

Well-known member
Lots of SCSI card drivers didn't make the leap to 64-bit, most notably the Adaptec AHA-28x0 family (based on the AIC-78xx chips). So, using the older Windows 7 drivers is usually out of the question. Annoying because these cards are VERY commonplace, cheap, and have 50-pin SCSI connectors.
 

slomacuser

Well-known member
I’ll just ask here, are pci SCSI cards interchangeable with PC and Mac? Can the same card work on both systems?
 

Byrd

Well-known member
I’ll just ask here, are pci SCSI cards interchangeable with PC and Mac? Can the same card work on both systems?

Like nearly all PCI cards, no - you'd need a x86 compatible ROM. Some Adaptec PCI SCSI cards did have capability to be flashed over, but as others have noted they are less useful in x86 machines.
 

NJRoadfan

Well-known member
You can use Mac SCSI and ATA cards in PCs without flashing. You can't boot off drives connected to them since there is no compatible ROM present, but if the card has Windows drivers, they will be detected and usable.
 

Tom2112

Well-known member
OK, so I finally gave up trying to get the Iomega-branded SCSI card working. I stumbled across a page on SavageTaylor's website that showed how to get an Adaptec 2900-series SCSI card working on Win10. So I bought an AHA-2940U card and followed their directions, and it works! Well... at least the SCSI card works. But Win10 does NOT recognize the Iomega Jaz drive. It sees the drive, but doesn't know what it is and won't mount/format any media in the drive - though it does show the drive in Disk Manager.

Link to Savage Taylor's page on it:
https://www.savagetaylor.com/2018/0...-adaptec-29xx-ultra-or-aic-7870-adaptec-78xx/

Anyone know any tricks to get the Jaz drive recognized in Win10?
 

Unknown_K

Well-known member
The only cards with drivers for x64 are for Win 7 x64 and are for the last gen PCIE ATTO UL5D U320 and the PCI-X Adaptec 39160 (which works in a normal PCI slot and I have one in my main rig that way) and probably the 39320.

Somebody posted about the UL5D running under W10 x64 using the x64 Win7 drivers but that post was back in 2016 and who knows what Windows updates have done since then.
 

Tom2112

Well-known member
Thanks Unknown_K, but I have the SCSI card sorted out. It's the Jaz drive that is unrecognized by Windows 10.
 

Unknown_K

Well-known member
I suggest you get an old machine from the trash somewhere and just use that for vintage removable drives.
 

Byrd

Well-known member

Tom2112

Well-known member
Can you see the drives using the CMD utility?
Thanks JB

Hmm... Interestingly, the drive is assigned a drive letter. I tried the commands in that link, and they all showed a drive, but no volumes on it. Most reported that it was a removable disk and did not have any disk/media inserted.

I may try booting off a GParted live cd and partitioning a Jaz disk that way and see if Windows will see it then.
 

Realitystorm

Well-known member
OK, so I finally gave up trying to get the Iomega-branded SCSI card working. I stumbled across a page on SavageTaylor's website that showed how to get an Adaptec 2900-series SCSI card working on Win10. So I bought an AHA-2940U card and followed their directions, and it works! Well... at least the SCSI card works. But Win10 does NOT recognize the Iomega Jaz drive. It sees the drive, but doesn't know what it is and won't mount/format any media in the drive - though it does show the drive in Disk Manager.

Link to Savage Taylor's page on it:
https://www.savagetaylor.com/2018/0...-adaptec-29xx-ultra-or-aic-7870-adaptec-78xx/

Anyone know any tricks to get the Jaz drive recognized in Win10?
Odd, that's my site and I was able to get both my 100Mb SCSI zip drive and my 2GB SCSI Jazz to work with it. I was able to format them, and read from them. But that was back in 2018. Do you have termination enabled on your Jazz drive? Also did you try with different disks? I now use SCSI2SD, MacSD and ZuluSCSI so my zip and jazz haven't seen much use in years.

Currently my PCI desktop is dead, I need a new power supply. If I get it working again I'll test things out with the latest version of Windows 10 in case Microsoft has changed something.
 

Tom2112

Well-known member
Odd, that's my site and I was able to get both my 100Mb SCSI zip drive and my 2GB SCSI Jazz to work with it. I was able to format them, and read from them. But that was back in 2018. Do you have termination enabled on your Jazz drive? Also did you try with different disks? I now use SCSI2SD, MacSD and ZuluSCSI so my zip and jazz haven't seen much use in years.

Currently my PCI desktop is dead, I need a new power supply. If I get it working again I'll test things out with the latest version of Windows 10 in case Microsoft has changed something.
I very much appreciate the info, RS! And even more, I _really_ appreciate your site! I've learned a lot of things from your pages. I use your System 7 image files all the time.

I think I might have a pair of bad drives. I don't know why I didn't think of it, but I tried the same jaz disks in a known good working 2gb external drive. Now that I've got a working SCSI card in the Win10 PC, it recognized the 2GB external jaz drive without any issue. It opened all of the disks and they even had data on them from the previous owner. I backed the data up, then formatted the disks. Everything went fine.

I have two internal Jazz 1G drives, and I don't think either works properly. One just spins and clicks - is that the click of death? The other takes the disk, spins it up, then just sits there - that's the one I have connected to the Win10 PC. I'm going to try pulling it out and swapping it with the clicking one. But I'm not holding much hope for it. The 2G jaz drive sounds fine - like an old hard drive. The two 1G drives both sound awful.

So, probably, mystery solved. Two bad 1G drives. :( At least my 2G jaz drive works! But there go my dreams of installing an internal jaz drive in both my PC and Mac SE/30! ... Maybe... LOL
 

Realitystorm

Well-known member
I have two internal Jazz 1G drives, and I don't think either works properly. One just spins and clicks - is that the click of death? The other takes the disk, spins it up, then just sits there - that's the one I have connected to the Win10 PC. I'm going to try pulling it out and swapping it with the clicking one. But I'm not holding much hope for it. The 2G jaz drive sounds fine - like an old hard drive. The two 1G drives both sound awful.
Could it be a termination issue for the internal drives? Perhaps you have neither terminated, or both?
 

sunjar

New member
Thanks Unknown_K, but I have the SCSI card sorted out. It's the Jaz drive that is unrecognized by Windows 10.
An alternative solution is to install a Linux system on a partition of the hard disk, such as the common Ubunutu, which can recognize mostly strange or ancient adapter and device. You can use this method to determine if your drive is faulty.
 

Tom2112

Well-known member
Could it be a termination issue for the internal drives? Perhaps you have neither terminated, or both?
It definitely could be... I'm not sure how to test it definatively. The internal jaz drives are supposed to auto terminate. I did pick up a couple 3-connector 50-pin cables, so I'll try the internal drive on the middle connector and a 50-pin terminator on the end connector. I just haven't gotten around to it since the new cables/terminators came in. I can also try it "external" with a ribbon-to-DB adapter and a separate power supply.
 

Tom2112

Well-known member
Tested the one internal 1g jaz drive as an external setup with an ATX power supply and a ribbon-to-din adapter. My Mac SE/30 properly recognized the drive and its SCSI ID (6) and even recognized that there was a disk inserted! SCSIprobe didn't report any SCSI termination issues and my other SCSI devices were working fine (I had a zip drive connected on ID 5, and no, it was not terminating the chain, the terminator switch was off on the zip drive).

But that's where the good news stopped. It did a lot of clicking, eventually it would say the disk needed initialized. When I tried to initialize it, it would mess about for a bit and then come back with the CD icon and tell me the disk was write protected. I know for a fact it is not write protected, as I had used the disk in my 2g external jaz drive successfully. I tried other disks, I tried removing the CD driver (extension), thinking maybe it was interfering with the iomega driver. But it was not. Among my many attempts, I even tried it without the disk inserted and it would recognize the drive. Due to the clicking (is that click of death? is that even a jaz drive thing, as I thought that was a zip drive thing?!?) and the refusal to see the disk as writable means something is wrong with the drive. As far as I understand, jaz drives can be write protected using the jaz tools software, but I don't have anything with that software running. Also, the disk was writable in my 2g jaz drive, so I think it is this drive.

I'll uninstall the other internal jaz drive for testing later. I'm not expecting it to work either.

On the good side, I discovered an old IBM SCSI CDROM drive that I bought a while back while I was looking for an adapter. The drive works like a charm with my SE/30 and it is dead silent when running (not like some of the later drives that sounded like aircraft taking off). So... yay!?!
 

Tom2112

Well-known member
Tested the other internal 1gig jaz drive. Long story short: it is bad too. My SE/30 wouldn't ever recognize that there was a disc inserted. So that's two internal jaz drives that are bad... I wonder if they can be repaired or even combined parts into one working drive... It would probably be more cost effective to source another internal drive... So I did. I found a 2gig internal on ebay and ordered it. Hopefully it arrives in one piece.

I also tested the three internal zip drives I had. 1 is a 250mb unit, and two are 100mb units. One of the 100mb units didn't work. It would spin up, but never actually read the disk. The other two drives worked flawlessly. So they will probably get installed in one of my G4 desktops. I'd love to have an internal zip drive in my SE/30, but these are IDE units, not SCSI. I've never seen an internal SCSI zip drive... I'll probably put the internal 2gb jaz into one of my SE/30's. I'll have to do some cutting on the case front. I have a non-functioning SE that might donate it's front cover to be sacrificed...
 
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