: This is an year old article I wrote to someone on Internet having
: problems with DC2000 and how to use this driver.



First of all, when you put anything nice into your machine it means little
trouble in your PC. But when it is resolved it will be double fun (fan? ;-)
). 

Here are my system.ini disk related settings:

[386Enh]
32BitDiskAccess=on
; Device=*wdctrl    ;Was the driver
Device=*int13
Device=*blockdev
Device=DC2000.386   ;The new driver
OverlappedIO=true   ;Allows disk resource sharing for many tasks
VirtualHDIrq=on     ;Enables use of Windows own disk system

Then the WDCTRLDISABLE=ON setting in autoexec.bat is also removed.

This settings, may affect, but very likely not:

[386Enh]
FileSysChange=on
InDOSPolling=true
ReflectDOSInt2A=false
Int28Critical=true
IRQ9Global=true
HighFloppyReads=false
NMIReboot=true

If after these settings you have still problem to use DC2000.386, I think
the problem is not directly in disk system, check out for memory manager
settings, and so on.

My DC2000 have it's own ROM, it must be excluded from upper memory. I cannot
say what address exactly exclude, because you can set the DC2000 ROM
position by jumpers (JP5). If you don't know current setting try Manifest if
you have Qemm or PC-Tools Sysinfo, or anything which can analyse uppermemory
area. If you don't have such diagnostics tool, open your case and look at
jumpers. Mine is on C800-C9FF and if you end with messing with jumpers it
think you'd better set it this way, because it becomes right after VGA bios,
and therefore gives clear continuous upper memory block after CA00. If you
use exclude parameter with Qemm or Emm, you don't have to use EMMExclude in
Windows. (BTW: Manual sez the default BIOS setting is D800 and it can be
also disabled.)

If your contoller doesn't have ROM, I dpn't know how to act. These Windows
things (DC2000.386) might work, or then not. It wholely depends on
DC2000.386 driver. It might be designed to use ROM. If you use TSR instead
of ROM, they should have similar interfaces, which means that there is
_theoretically_ no difference. There is usual things with TSRs, try both
conventional and upper mem.

I always run DC2000 in fastest (turbo) mode. And also speed jumpers (JP6) on
controller itself is set to speed2 (highest). Also I have allowed caching of
upper memory area and shadowed all ROMs.

I did WinBench too (version 3.11).  As you can see there is quite clear
difference. Don't take any BenchMarks too seriously.

Testing environment:

Machine:    33MHz i486SX, 128kb cache, 8Mb memory, AMI-BIOS
Controller: Promise Technology DC2000 VLB-IDE
Drive:      Quantum ProDrive LPS 240A, 256kb internal cache, 16ms seek time
Cache:      SmartDrive v5.0, 2048kb, default element size

(With DC2000.386)

Block Sizes (bytes)     200      512      2048     4096
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Sequential Reads     315989   611337   1053497  1095154  bytes/sec
Sequential Writes    202966   474970    935434  1074843  bytes/sec
Random Reads           6875    18121     69827   141394  bytes/sec
Random Writes          5070    27835    129436   253927  bytes/sec

Apparent Disk WINMARK 33837 bytes/sec


(Without DC2000.386)

Block Sizes (bytes)     200      512      2048     4096
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Sequential Reads     339614   558824    866792  1036362  bytes/sec
Sequential Writes    156945   417344    782792   891446  bytes/sec
Random Reads           5759    14999     59447   101754  bytes/sec
Random Writes          4023    25925     96561   177351  bytes/sec

Apparent Disk WINMARK 27970 bytes/sec


I _hope_ this will aide you a teeny bit. Anyway PCs are very  sensitiveee
things. Check out for correct position of moon and sun. ;-)