At 16:45 -0800 01/26/2003, tom wrote: >guys, guys guys!!!!! > >I am not the soldering ace you guys are. I really don't care if it works >under macos or not. What I was wondering was if the pc version of the >card (which is much more easy to find cheap) would interfere with the >s900 booting macos off of another internal bus. Sometimes the s900 has >its own little pci quirks, and I was wondering if either of you had >managed to boot into macos with the pc card installed(not off of the >card). I can get drivers for linux and netbsd for the 2940uw to drive >the ultrawide drives that I have. I can't for the E100. The E100 >firmware messes with the open source drivers for the qlogic chips as >well as adding another bridge for the networking part of the card to the >pci bus. The dec chips on the E100 networking side don't seem to play >very nicely either with open source in umax's implementation. I knew >from earlier posts to the list that the mac card had a bigger flash area >to store the firmware and that one of you had an article on xlr8 on how >to replace the chip. I was hoping that in one of these endeavors that >you could tell me if the machine would boot with a pc card >installed(still pc), or if one of those little firmware gotchas >prevented that from occuring.The experience on this list is a wonderful >resource to draw upon.
Apologies for missing the point. The MacOS boots fine wtih a PC 2940UW with PC BIOS on-board installed in the Mac PCI slot. No problem at all as far as I know or have experienced. You know, it is also possible to pull the AM29F040 chip off of the E100 and blank it. That would probably allow you to use the E100 under BSD. Of course, it would be pretty useless for MacOS after that. Although, with the Flash blanked, the E100 SCSI CP will offer to update the firmware on the card, and afterwards it works fine on a Mac again.... Okay, anohter useless piece of trivia. I don't think that there is any kind of PCI bridge on the E100 card. I haven't traced out the connections (yet, this LOTTD gets longer and longer) but it appears that the network portion of the E100 simply shares the PCI connections which are common to all members of the PCI bus with the SCSI portion of the card. Then the network portion gets the PCI connections which must be unique for each slot through that little tab at the end of slot 1. The hardware supports this, becasue the Bandit PCI controller by itself probably supports up to 16 PCI slots, and the arbiter chip which waves baton for the PCI bus definitely supports up to six devices. So there's room for a hitchhiker like this, as far as the hardware is concerned. The messy part is that the A1, B1, C1 slot designations seem to be built into the firmware (the ROM) of this generation Mac. So Umax must have done something tricky to get the Mac to believe that there is another PCI slot. I read something about a sort of dumby/virtual E100 slot which supports some legacy thing having to do with networking, and I think that Umax hooked into that artifact for the E100 card. In other words, the E100 card takes its name from this legacy artifact in these machine's firmware which allows the card to work. Kennedy, do you or any of your sources have insight into this? Jeff Walther -- SuperMacs is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Refurbished Drives | Service & Replacement Parts [EMAIL PROTECTED] | & CDRWs on Sale! | Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> SuperMacs list info: <http://lowendmac.com/supermacs/list.shtml> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/supermacs%40mail.maclaunch.com/> --------------------------------------------------------------- >The Think Different Store http://www.ThinkDifferentStore.com ---------------------------------------------------------------
