LS120 Tech Tips

Tips from Imation Tech Support and Users

 Tips:

1. Make sure your BIOS is not expecting a drive to use the motherboard's existing standard floppy disk drive controller - this will definitely interfere with your SuperDisk's need to grab that drive letter. The settings you need to change may manifest in two places: Standard CMOS settings and, on my motherboard, there's an entry labeled "PNP, PCI and ONBOARD I/O" that also needs to have the ONBOARD FDD CONTROLLER option disabled.

   Then, In your CMOS settings (BIOS), there's a place to "Force update ESCD." (In my system, it's in "PNP, PCI and ONBOARD I/O" again.) This stands for extended system configuration data. Set this to Enable. (It will automatically reset itself to "Disabled" the next time you reboot, as you don't need or want to reset this data every time. Reboot, check status. If that does the trick (it probably will), great. If not....

   Well, I had to call "ComputerCare" to figure out how to enter BIOS, since it wasn't described in the manual for the Compaq Presaio 5650.  All I had to do was press the F10 key while the Compaq Logo was on at the start of the booting of the PC.

   I then entered "Compaq Computer Corporation Setup Utility" which had File, Storage, Security and Advanced menus.

   The Storage menu included Diskette Drives and IDE Devices submenus.

   The Diskette Drives submenu include,
   Floppy Diskette A:    "type",
   Floppy Diskette B:    "type"

   "Type" was everything from 5.25 720KB to 3.5 120MB and "not installed" which was the default choice.  I changed it to 3.5 120MB for the A: exited and saved... and the booting continued but no change.  I rebooted and entered BIOS again and A: had reverted to "not installed" by itself.

   I then tried the Advanced menu which included Power On Selftest, Bus Options and Device Options submenus, but nothing there remotely looked like some- thing that resembled your BIOS/System so I decided not to mingle with that.
    

2. Set IDE devices (particularly the one with the SuperDisk on it, which I assume is "Secondary Slave.") in Standard CMOS Setup to "AUTO." Reboot, check status. If that does the trick, great. If not....

   In the IDE devices submenu you couldn't choose "AUTO" anywhere, just "enabled" or "unabled", so again I chose not to interfere with the default settings.
    

3. In Windows Device Manager, specify drive letters for your drives, using the procedure outlined here:

   Procedure:
   Start>Settings>Control Panel>System>Device Manager
   Expand "Disk Drives."
   Click on e.g., SuperDisk Drive.
   Click "Properties" at the bottom of the window.
   Under "Reserved Drive Letters" select drive letter A: (if possible; sometimes it's not) for the SuperDisk drive. The next time you launch Windows with your SuperDisk in there, the SuperDisk will be drive "A."
   Repeat procedure as necessary for additional drives.

Well I couldn't select drive letter A:, only E: and above, so I choose F: for the SuperDisk and E: for the DVD-Drive.

That worked, so I'm now using the drive letter F: for the LS-120 SuperDisk.

Imation provides additional details:

What is most likely happening is this: Windows 95 and MS-DOS both have a limitation in the number of entries they have for files in a directory. The maximum number of files or directories you can have in one directory is 512. In MS-DOS this is not a problem because there is a one to one relationship between the amount of files in a directory and the amount
of entries used up. In Windows 95 this no longer holds true. Files using long file names (files not using the 8.3 naming convention) take up at least two or in some cases many more entries. The net effect is that around 10-20 megabytes, there are no free entries in the directory table.

To fix this, put your files into directories so that the amount of files in any one directory is not very large. You might consider categorising your files using directories and this will have the same effect.

Hope this helps
Debbie
Imation Data Care

Thanks to Soren Bugge

Imation's Bill Wilson writes:
There is an 800k (Mac GCR disk) double density issue with the LS120. They don't work, period. The 720k issue mentioned in your article is due to a problem with Apple's PC Exchange.  Upgrades for the OS should 'help', but PC Exchange is still flaky.

Imation's PC USB drive has been shipped, and drivers are available at http://www.superdisk.com/sc/sc_dl.html
Please keep in mind that the first attempt to resolve an issue with an LS 120 drive is to verify the brand, and download the latest drivers for both the drive, and the OS.  This resolves the largest majority of "Imation Superdisk Drive issues".

You may also want to point out that while we do not support Linux, the latest release of RedHat Linux does contain support for the "LS120" drive.

Imation notes that multiple disk installation problems on the (i)Mac can be circumvented by downloading the PACE anti-piracy software from www.paceap.com.

For more LS-120 info:

• Setting Drive Letters: How to assign your SuperDisk as Drive "A:"
• LS-120 and DOS
• LS-120-caveats
• Modify Your LS-120
• Also, try an Altavista search for LS-120 installation tips and driver details.