Rick DeNatale wrote:
A bit of a primer on IDE RAID and how it interacts with the BIOS would probably by ideal. Let me start by saying that (as you mentioned later in your email) the card you have *optionally* supports RAID. If you don't configure any RAID devices, it simply acts as a normal IDE controller. I think the problem you're seeing with it not booting is one of two things -- either your motherboard's BIOS is really confused by the card, or more likely, it's confused by the presence of what it sees as two bootable add-in cards (both the IDE card and your SCSI card). The simple test would be removing the SCSI card and seeing if the BIOS will boot to the IDE, but if you've already got a working solution it may not be worth the hassle.Well my BIOS doesn't give any option other than by hard/floppy/cd disk number.
It's also a little odd in the way it boots for SCSI.
When you power on you get the IBM splash screen, with the F1 prompt to enter setup.
Regardless of whether you press F1 or not, the next thing you see is a message from the Adaptec SCSI BIOS with another F key prompt to enter SCSI setup, I think that this just lets you map SCSI device numbers to BIOS device numbers, but I haven't really mucked with it so i'm not sure.
I've pulled the IDE card out so that I can boot, but IIRC when it's in
the raid setup prompt comes up either right after the splash screen or
after the Adaptec SCSI "dialog". I don't think that I can even get
into the bios setup
Well I don't know why you'd want to flash the BIOS on a RAID card unless a) the manufacturer released an upgrade or b) the card had sufficient horsepower to do the job but the RAID functions are not enabled in the card's BIOS. Since you have one which has that functionality, and turning it off (contrary to what you may have read) wouldn't really have any effect, because either way it's still a bootable device, which is what's confusing your BIOS, in my estimation.I've done a bit of googling on this silicon image chipset, and there seem to be both raid and non-raid cards using the chipset. Some comments talk about re-flashing the card, some cards seem to have ROMs rather than flash though. There are two chips on the card, and the one which I presume contains the bios has a big red sticker over it so I can't determine whether it's ROM or flash.
Having said that... for general enlightenment, the red sticker is probably (and I'm guessing here, with out seeing the hardware) because it's a EPROM chip - short for "Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory". The erasable part is accomplished by removing that sticker, and exposing the chip to a relatively high powered UV light. You can then program the ROM with an appropriate programmer. Note that an appropriate programmer does not mean software on your computer with the card in a PCI slot, it means a hardware device usually attached to a parallel or serial port, with only the PROM chip plugged into it. This is generally considered outside the realm of what a user's willing to do to upgrade the BIOS for an add-in card, it's primarily built that way so that the manufacturer can continue to develop the software after all of the hardware has been made, and "fix" potential software problems before release with out throwing out good hardware. There are other types of PROMs, specifically EEPROMs, meaning Electronically Erasable PROM - this is what's usually found on your typical motherboard that stores the BIOS - and the flash procedure takes advantage of a special programmer built-in to the hardware, which is activated by the flash programs you've probably run to upgrade your motherboard's BIOS. Enough rambling about embedded hardware...
In any event the flashingTry popping the top, and using a miniPCI <-> PCI adapter? Might be a little hard to get the case back together that way.
tools all seem to require Windoze, and the only windoze machine I've
got access to is a Thinkpad and none of the little swinging doors seem
to be big enough to accomodate a PCI card (even a smallish one like
this).
...In any event it's a learning experience. Most of the time I deal with
high-level software architecture issues, I'm really catching up on all
the hardware stuff I've missed since the mid to late 1980s. <G>
Best of luck. :)
Aaron S. Joyner -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/ TriLUG PGP Keyring : http://trilug.org/~chrish/trilug.asc
