NASLite Network Attached Storage

I will try and find an old 1.1 USB flash to try.

The ones i purchased were Viking 256MB USB pen drives from eBuyer.

As for the Motherboard BIOS in true COMPAQ fashion there is virtually no settings to change... and absolutely NO USB options.

Believe it or not it also has no option to turn of auto detection of IDE drives either. grrr

Just some thoughts pertinent to what you are experiencing - The USB Flash Utility CD-ROM that loads the USB Flash with NASLite uses Linux facilities in order to render and access the USB hardware. It is far more capable than the kicker floppy DOS based drivers. I suspect that some older machines have USB hardware or USB BIOS support that is substandard and therefore subject to conditions that prevent the kicker from operating properly with some flash drives. There really isn’t much one can do about that other than experiment.

Regarding you last post. Why then does the Kicker work using the same flash drive if I plug it into a PCI USB 2.0 card, and not the MOBO's legacy USB 1.1 ports?
Thanks.

Tony is right, I suspected the driver on the kicker disk using Version 2.06 USBASPI.SYS, there is a newer version 2.20

v2.06 from what I have read it was designed for USB 2.0 but does support 1.1 usb.

You might want to try editing the config.sys on the kicker as there are a few switches you can add.

Example below
device=USBASPI.SYS /v /slow /o

The driver scans all three USB controller specs by default, but you can limit which controllers are enabled using these switches:

/e EHCI spec (USB 2.0)
/o OHCI spec (newer USB 1.x)
/u UHCI spec (older USB 1.x)

or you could locate other drivers and try them.

Eden

Maybe the driver dont see the usb on the 1.1 bus and will see it on usb 2.0 bus

Eden

OK i got ahold of v2.20 and tried it simpley by replacing the existing version of USBASPI.SYS.

Exactly the same result.

I can probably get ahold of a V1.1 flash drive in the next couple fo days as well to test with.

Edeng, Fat, Tony & Wilbur: I hate giving in, so here is what I did (and yes the "troublesome" Lexar USB Drive is now working). I went into my "stack of stuff" and found an old USB 1.1 PCI card. I installed the card in the old Sony Vaio - inserted the Lexar USB Drive that wouldn't work in the legacy Sony USB 1.1 ports, and bingo up it comes - proud to be a NASLite server! So it is not a USB 2.0 issue, or necessarily a Flash Drive issue ... the Kicker is looking for something that the PCI USB 1.1 card could provide, and the MOBO USB 1.1 ports couldn't.
I'm not touching it again ... well at least until NASLite 2.0 is available.

well i just tried the same disk and flash disk on a modern athlon board and again no device found.

grrr this is so frustrating when the usb utility works so perfectly

Fat: I had the same problem until I used either a USB 2.0 or USB 1.1 PCI card. I tried the USB Drive in an old Sony and a modern Dell - in both cases the drive could not be found. However after installing a USB 2.0 PCI card, and then another time a USB 1.1 PCI card the same USB Flash could be found by the Kicker both times.

cheers for the tip i will try and see if i have a usb card kicking about.

i dont really want to buy one as i have just purchased 4 300gig drives and 2 pen drives aling with NASLITE+ and right now i have a large paperweight lol

Its so frustrating that Linux sees the pens and works but DOS doesnt.

Fellow NASLite+ USBers: Based on my limited "experiment" of installing a USB 2.0 or 1.1 card to get the Kicker Disk to recognize and boot a USB Flash Drive it otherwise wouldn't find or boot from the MOBO's USB ports, I ask the following:
1. Is the installation of a USB PCI Card a potential "solution" for all those Pen Drives that were tried but previously "wouldn't work"?
2. Is there something that the Kicker Disk needs to add to emulate whatever a USB PCI card is providing?
3. If "NASLite V2" expands to include external USB HDDs, is a USB PCI card some "insurance" for drive compatibility, rather than leaving it to the "problematic" MOBO USB ports?
---
Just for giggles I have now tried another pen drive (San Disk) that the Kicker couldn't find ... it failed in a modern Dell, a new eMachines, and the old Sony ... I dropped a USB 1.1 PCI card (one at a time) in each and they all booted from the Kicker/Pen Drive combo.
Thanks.

When I was working on my prototype kicker floppy, I also had one board that wouldn't work. The DOS mode usb driver is good, but not great. But it does open up NASLite+USB for a lot of machines that couldn't do it any other way, and if adding a PCI card gets a few of the stragglers on board I think we're doing pretty good. I'm glad they decided to make it a supported part of the product.

lusid,

I am working another version of the kicker using different USB dos drivers, the guys who made the Wakeusb also had some problems with some machines not seeing the flash usb.

Lusid take a look at this http://linuxgazette.net/116/okopnik1.html can a linux disk be used to boot naslite+?

Eden

Ok I have created 5 kicker floppy disks, I still got some testing to do.

Eden

Some info on the subject:

http://www.bootdisk.com/usb.htm

Eden asked in mail:


Use and edit the kicker as you see fit guys