Re: Boot mystery deepens
- From: "Ian Johnston" <ian.groups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 11 Oct 2005 13:28:33 GMT
On Tue, 11 Oct 2005 11:59:24 UTC, Mike Luther <mike.luther@xxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
> What version of OS/2 and fixpack level? Also. where did you get the
> SCSI driver versions for the OS/2 system; IBM or Adaptec?
eCS, 1.24. Latest Adaptec drivers from the eCS website. But that can't
be the problem, I think, since the boot never even gets as far as
showing me the boot manager screen, so OS/2 isn't started.
Incidentally, if I drop boot manager ad try to get it to pick up the
eCS partition I get "No Operating System Found", whic makes me wonder
if it's something about booting from a BM / HPFS partition which it
hates.
> Another issue with the updated BIOS was that the earler versions of the
> driver updates from the Adaptec site, per my experience here with that
> card were bad.
BIOS 1.34.2 is the one which works. BIOS 2.20.20 is the one which
doesn't - that's the latest one from Adaptec's website. I have now
tried this with two cards, by the way.
> Another note. I've never used any SCSI hard drive with any version of
> the 2940UW controller without first low level formatting it on the
> controller.
I'm trying to avoid that - it would take ages (I did a scan on a 1GB
disk on the system just to check whether it would) and I'd be very
surprised and not terribly impressed if a reformat was needed after a
BIOS upgrade. Still lurking as a last resort, of course...
> If you find that the low
> level drive test does show a problem, I'd bet you have a drive going
> defective and you are faced with more problems than just this.
I'd be cross, too, as the boot SCSI drive is a 36GB Maxtor and only
about four months old!
> Another Adaptec issue is that as well as what was suggested to you in
> earlier threads on this on OEM vs. vendor specific versions of the
> cards, there are both 2940UW and 2940UW Pro versions.
Good point. As I recall, the Pros are the ones which let you have
devices on all three connectors. No, mine are both identical Adaptec
AHA-2940UW's - or at least that's what it says on the controller chip.
Not OEM.
> Two more last thoughts. Are you absolutely certain that you are using
> this card on a for sure dedicated IRQ that isn't being shared with
> something else?
That's a good question, and I'll have a look. Annoyingly, the
motherboard BIOS setup gives no access to any of the IRQ stuff.
> Finally, are you absolutely sure that you have your cable and
> termination issues clean? That plus are using a SCSI drive and setup
> which is carefully adjusted for spindle sync mode?
More good points. In my defence, it's been running fine for seven
years now, with occasional replacement disks. To the best of my
knowledge all the termination is fine. And when I boot from CD, I can
see the not-bootable-from drivejust fine. I can read from it, write to
it, fiddle around with BM (ie I can see boot manager) so as far as I
can tell, the card is seeing and talking to the drive absolutely fine
... except that it won't boot from it. Incidentally, checking the HD
boot priority sequence in the motherboard BIOS shows all three SCSI
HDs just fine.
Many thanks for your time and help. I still have option B, which is to
stick to the old BIOS, after all. After a few days sitting powered
off, the other problems have gone: the CDs are visible again and the
Zip drive obeys its start unit command.
All very odd
Ian
.
- References:
- Boot mystery deepens
- From: Ian Johnston
- Re: Boot mystery deepens
- From: Mike Luther
- Boot mystery deepens
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