Zip 250 Ultrabay 2000 in Dock II in DOS?

[Paul S]

I am trying to access the Zip 250 Ultrabay 2000 drive installed in the Dock II attached to a T40 in DOS mode. Unfortunately, the T40 BIOS does not recognize the zip drive as a bootable device. When I boot from a USB floppy and run the zip DOS driver downloaded from IOMEGA, the DOS driver cannot find the zip drive to assign a drive letter to it. I suspect that the problem is that the zip drive is connected to the Dock which complicates matters.

I would appreciate if anyone has found a solution to this problem.

[Conmee]

Unfortunately, DOS and real-mode Win95/98/Me boot environments don't recognize the Ultra DMA controller onthe Dock II... so nothing you put in the Dock II will be recognized. Here's the weird thing though. I can put my DVD-R/RW in the Dock II and boot from a bootable CDROM in the DVD-R/RW from the Ultrabay on the Dock II, but it only reads it as an A: drive... if I try to load mscdex.exe, it tells me there are no drives present. So from a boot standpoint, the Dock II only supports floppy/A: drive emulation boot (i.e. boot from CD but can only read the bootimg file, not the rest of the CD filesystem) or from an actual Ultrabay floppy drive. And if you boot from CD or HDD or USB floppy attached to the ThinkPad it will fail to recognize the Dock II device in the Ultrabay. This sucks because I can't boot to real mode Partition Magic or Drive Image or Ghost and copy/manipulate the drive in the Dock II. just my experience...

Daniel.

[PaulS]

Thanks for clarifying the hardware architecture of the Dock II with respect to the Thinkpad.

Does IBM have a wish list so that I can ask that the BIOS provide support for accessing storage devices connected to the ultrabay 2000 slot in the Dock II?