On Sat, Mar 28, 2009 at 6:51 PM, Harry Putnam <rea...@newsguy.com> wrote: > Paul Hartman <paul.hartman+gen...@gmail.com> writes: > >> Are you using the latest BIOS for the Adaptec card? It looks like the >> chipset is Silicon Image 3112A and the latest BIOS on SI's website is >> 4.2.84. http://www.siliconimage.com/support/ > > After downloading the bios upgrade and trying to figure out how to use > it from the instructions... One thing is not clear to me, does the > procedure write something to the chip on the card or to the system > (pc) bios.
I think it should be the BIOS on the Adaptec card. > Also I don't see any evidence this upgrade would make the card work > with those 750 drives. You could perhaps try giving Adaptec a call or e-mail and see if anyone there can tell you what that controller supports, since their website doesn't really say. > Even worse, I'd have to install the card on a different machine since > the one I needed it for has no floppy. And it appears I'd either need > to install it on a windows machine or install a little free dos > application that allows user to create a bootable floppy to get the > job done. If you can manage to get a floppy disk image via dosbox or wine or something, or by making the disk on a machine that does have a floppy drive, it should be possible to burn it to a CD or bootable USB device. This page has some instructions on how to burn a floppy image to CD: http://linux-issues.blogspot.com/2008/09/how-to-make-bootable-msdos-cd-from.html But, I think you're probably right... it seems more and more likely that the controller just doesn't work with drives of that size. :( One last random idea; several years ago on my old 266MHz Pentium II, it only supported drives up to about 16GB or so... I got an 80GB drive and the machine wouldn't get through POST with it attached, it would just freeze when it got to that point, apparently because the motherboard/BIOS didn't support drives that large. I managed to get around this problem by unplugging the drive, then booting into the BIOS and /disabling/ that drive (rather than having it set to "Auto detect" or manually defining the drive geometry). That caused it to skip it entirely during the boot process, which allowed the operating system (OS/2 Warp) to load off of my boot drive (which was within the BIOS limits), at which point the OS detected the drive and it worked just fine. I don't know how (or if) you could do that with your add-in controller but I thought I'd throw it out there just in case it may apply. Good luck, Paul
