From trs80 at ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au Thu Dec 7 15:34:03 2006 From: trs80 at ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au (James Andrewartha) Date: Thu, 7 Dec 2006 15:34:03 +0900 (WST) Subject: [tech] martello sata 3124 cards Message-ID: As you may have noticed, martello was down for a few hours this afternoon. JCF and I decided to install the new SATA cards into martello. Things didn't go to plan - the cards' BIOS took a very long time to probe the disks, and then claimed there weren't any. Some experimentation showed that they had no problem with no drives connected, but obviously that's not very useful. We decided to flash the motherboard BIOS, in case it was some PCI bug that had been fixed, but that didn't change anything. So then we went and flashed the SATA cards' BIOS. The first one went ok, but the BIOS no longer appeared during boot, however Linux detected them fine. The second one refused to be detected by the flash program, despite the flash chip being listed as supported. So we looked it up, and worked out the size and selected the similar chip in the menu we were helpfully presented with, but that didn't work either, and the BOIS version was reported as garbage. In the end we gave up and just left the working card in there, with 4 drives on it and the boot and another drive on the onboard controller. On the plus side, SMART now works because we can run a recent kernel version. We should talk to AusPCMarket and get a replacement card. -- # TRS-80 trs80(a)ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au #/ "Otherwise Bub here will do \ # UCC Wheel Member http://trs80.ucc.asn.au/ #| what squirrels do best | [ "There's nobody getting rich writing ]| -- Collect and hide your | [ software that I know of" -- Bill Gates, 1980 ]\ nuts." -- Acid Reflux #231 /