they probably installed a smaller capacity flash chip on that run of cards.
That's what I would have said too, but the Promise controller has a built-in flash ROM. It's a one-chip solution, and is the only IC on the board. According to the Yellow Dog Linux UseNet archive <http://lists.terrasoftsolutions.com/pipermail/yellowdog-devel/2002-June/000 093.html>, the Sonnet Tempo ATA100 also uses the PDC20268 IC, the same as on my 100TX2. AFAIK two IC's with the same model number are functionally the same IC (though with a different firmware perhaps).
Oh, well now that's weird. Darn these people integrating the flash on the main chip! How do they expect us hardware hackers to desolder and reprogram the flash when they do that?
About the only thing you can do in a case like that (absent using hum-int to get the chip docs) is to laboriously trace out the connections to the chip with an ohmmeter on a couple of variants of the card. You'll quickly find that every fourth or fifth pin is power or ground which speeds things up considerably. Then, if you have a listing for the PCI signals, you can pretty quickly assign a pin on the chip to each of hte PCI signals (the card edge connector). Before you know it, you're down to the probably very few things that are switches to the chips.
Still, it's a big pain in the neck, hard on the eyes, and generally not worth the time, as compared to just going out and buying a retail version. Good for bragging rights in certain forums though.
Jeff Walther
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