[TriLUG] IDE Hard disk limitations BIOS and Linux

[Aaron S. Joyner]

Rick DeNatale wrote:

>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
>  
>
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.

>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.
>
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.

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 flashing
>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).
>  
>
Try popping the top, and using a miniPCI <-> PCI adapter?  Might be a 
little hard to get the case back together that way.

>...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