Re: SCSI card

[John Chapman <john@hannes.ndip.eskimo.net>]

On Thu, 12 Aug 1999, Jeff Bolle wrote:

> I've just built  PC164LX based system, 600mhz chip 256 megs of ram, 2 uw
> scsi hard drives. Everything seemed to be fine until I went to try and
> install an operating system only to discover that the alphabios does not see
> any of my hard drives. I am using a Tekram DC-390F scsi card, which is based
> on the Symbios 53C875  chip. Alphabios detects the scsi card properly, but
> fails to see any hard drives. Thinking something could be wrong with the
> card I plugged it into an intel based machine, where it worked properly
> seeing both drives. I have checked termination and just about everything
> else I could think of. I upgraded the bios in the scsi card and the
> alphabios to the latest version on api's site. If anyone has a work around
> or an explanation it would be much appreciated. Thanks.

This happened to me, too, on an SX with a Promise adapter, again with a
53C875 chip.  It works perfectly in i86 machines, but the Alphabios seems
unable to deal with it at all, and hangs when it tries to detect the
drives.  Putting a small boot disk on a different controller, and the
other disks on the 875 doesn't work, since the Alphabios still tries to
initialize the 875 when it boots, and stops cold.  

Could the Alphabios be tricked into not probing for the 875?  And would
MILO be able to initialize the device instead, perhaps?

John Chapman        hannes@eskimo.com       hannes@pop.nwnexus.com