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ASPI Drivers Information
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Under Construction |
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This page may not look good, but I hope it will do the job.
| IMPORTANT | 1. | DON'T DOWNLOAD OR INSTALL ANYTHING, IF YOU CAN RIP OK UNDER YOUR CONFIGURATION |
| 2. | A MOST RECENT VERSION OF DRIVERS IS POSSIBLE NOT TO WORK, WHILE A PREVIOUS WAS WORKING FINE. | |
| 3. | MAKE BACK UPS FOR
EVERY FILE YOU ARE GOING TO REPLACE. |
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| 4. | USE THESE FILES AT YOUR OWN RISK. I HAVE NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR ANY DAMAGE THAT MIGHT HAPPEN TO YOUR SYSTEM. |
ASPI drivers are very very messed up. Be careful and prepared to restore to your previous settings at any time.
ASPI interface is a batch of drivers that windows need to communicate with IDE CD ROM drives. Windows are talking to all CD ROM drives like they were SCSII, even if they are IDE drives. This is the way windows were designed. ASPI drivers are interpreting the commands that windows send to the drives so that they can be executed by IDE devises and vise versa.
ASPI drivers are coming with Windows installation disk and normally the are installed to your computer when you install Windows. However, the version of the drivers that you have, may be an old one, or some previous installed program messed up your drivers. So it is possible that your machine does have correctly installed these drivers.
When we say ASPI drivers we mean the following four files ...
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... and some registry entries
Before attempting to replace any of these files or use some upgrade utility, copy (not cut&paste or move) these files in a safe place. This way it is going to be easy to restore to your previous settings.
There are many versions of these drivers and not all of them can co-operate with windows rippers. WinDac, CD-Copy and CDDA extractor need version 4.54 or higher. (My Win95 CD ROM has version 1.0). On the other hand CDDA32 needs earlier versions to work. As you can understand the situation is a really messed up.
What can you do to update or reinstall these ASPI drivers ?
First of all check what version of drivers are installed in your machine. A fine utility is available from Adaptec, called aspichk.exe. Download it from here, or from www.adaptec.com. Run it and see the version of ASPI drivers installed to your system and if they are installed OK.
If you have version 4.53 or earlier, you need to upgrade to
4.54 in order to use WinDac or CDDA extractor.
A zip file that has version 4.54 files and a text file with instructions is available from
here.
Run WinZip and carefully read the txt file. Copy all the files that you already have in your system directory to a
safe place. Then extract the zip drivers and place
them to the appropriate folders.
Don't edit manually the registry as the help file says. Download Windows 95 RegFile (link to WinDac page) or Windows NT RegFile (link to WinDac page). Before you import them to your registry, open registry editor and export the registry. Then double click on the RegFile you have just downloaded and it will be merged to your registry.
Then reboot your computer, in order for the changes to take effect. (DON'T RUN WinDac BEFORE YOU REBOOT YOUR COMPUTER).
A more newer version of ASPI drivers is available from www.adaptec.com, in an exe file that installs the 4.57 version. Be sure that you have backed up your previous drivers before running it.
If the programs don't work even with the updated ASPI version
Then forget Windows ASPI based rippers. Your CD ROM is not co-operating with them. Download CDDA1.7 and try to run it in MS DOS mode (not in a Windows DOS box). It is possible to fail in the beginning because the program used ASPI interface by default. If you fail use MSCDEX mode. This must work. Command examples are:
| cdda /t 2 /f track2 /o | For ASPI mode | /t The
track you want to rip /f The filname of the .wav file /o Overight copy protection that comercial CDs have enabled /m MSCDEX only mode |
| cdda /t 2 /m /f track2 /o | For MSCDEX only mode |
If CDDA 1.7 works in MS DOS mode, then try it in a MS DOS box under windows. If it will work there, consider yourself lucky. Download CDDAfe (or any other CDDA 1.7 front end), and you will never need a windows ripper. Remember that CDDA1.7 is one of the best rippers.
How to restore to your original settings.
You don't really need to restore to your ASPI drivers. A newer version is better. But if you want to restore, simply move the files that you have backed up, to their folders. Then import your registry back up and restart your computer. In case you haven't backed up those files, despite the numerous warnings, there is still a solution. Extract the files from your Windows CD ROM cab files and then delete the registry entries manually. To extract the drivers from cab files will need cabinet file viewer, which is in the MS Powertoy. To delete the registry entries, read the txt file of the 4.54 ASPI drivers zip (see above) and see what entries were created.