🚀 go-pugleaf

Tom Bird wrote in message <6HB5$DA3EyK4Ewv$@dbqa.demon.co.uk>...
>In article <5o1f08.m04.ln@linux.a-taylor>, Andrew Taylor <news@hot-
>shot.demon.co.uk> writes
>
>>You can get a pci adaptec 2904 scsi card for like �25. Well worth it.
>
>Can you boot from these?  I suspect not but it's worth asking.
>
>I want a cheap bootable Linux supported narrow [1] SCSI card[2].
>


A few weeks ago I bought a non-bootable �25 inc vat "Iwill 2903" which is
basically an Advansys ABP-940 without the boot ROM and the settings storage
EEPROM on board. I'm fairly good with a soldering iron, so I soldered a DIL
socket into the vacant space on the board which looked as though it should
have the boot ROM on it, then I used my Black and Decker paint stripping
heat gun to remove the EEPROM from an old 3com ethernet card (most NICs have
EEPROMs on them, some ISA pnp soundcards do too) and soldered it neatly into
the bit of the board which looked vaguely as if it wanted an EEPROM
soldering onto it. The next step was to visit the Advansys FTP site, where I
found a firmware directory, complete with a note to say that you need an
EPROM programmer to program new firmware into their cards, which is ok
because I have one of those... I also had a duff old 386 motherboard with a
27C512 EPROM on it, so I prised the chip out of that and cooked it in my UV
EPROM eraser for a half hour or so and then programmed it up with the file
I'd downloaded from the Advansys FTP server. Randomly inserting 4700 ohm
resistors on the board (there were 6 vacant slots for what looked like
pullup resistors) proved to me that the board didn't really need them and it
booted the machine quite happily of a 2G scsi disk I'd been given (someone
insisted that it was faulty).

First time round the SCSI card did complain that the EEPROM was corrupt, but
theres an option in the CTRL-A boot screen for resetting to factory
defaults.

The end result is I have a bootable Ultra (narrow) SCSI card which cost me
�25, about 3/4 of an hour of my time, a knackered ethernet card, old 386
BIOS chip and some solder. It occasionally fails to reset which is fine by
me as I'm only using it in a test bed machine, I wouldn't want to put a hack
like this in a server anyway.

Those Iwill cards are everywhere, worth picking up if you're a bit of a
hardware hacker with a few spare minutes.

-phil