From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Dec 28 11:35:06 1995 Return-Path: owner-questions Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id LAA25234 for questions-outgoing; Thu, 28 Dec 1995 11:35:06 -0800 (PST) Received: from croute.com (ishm2.croute.com [199.97.106.1]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with SMTP id LAA25221 for ; Thu, 28 Dec 1995 11:34:59 -0800 (PST) Received: from bldg1.croute.com by croute.com (4.1/SMI-4.1) id AA01502; Thu, 28 Dec 95 13:42:50 CST Received: from COMPUROUTE/SpoolDir by bldg1.croute.com (Mercury 1.13); Thu, 28 Dec 95 13:58:30 +600 Received: from SpoolDir by COMPUROUTE (Mercury 1.13); Thu, 28 Dec 95 13:58:28 +600 From: "Larry Dolinar" Organization: CompuRoute, Inc. To: questions@FreeBSD.org Date: Thu, 28 Dec 1995 13:58:19 +600 CDT Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT Subject: Re: what does NCR support look like? Cc: msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au Priority: normal X-Mailer: Pegasus Mail v3.22 Message-Id: Sender: owner-questions@FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk Thus spake dkelly@iquest.com (David Kelly) (Thu, 28 Dec 1995): | Subject: Re: Recommendations for SCSI card? | Copies to: msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au | Michael Smith said about NCR BIOS: | > | >Funny, we only have one of them in an ASUS board; the rest are in a | >variety of J-random Triton PCI motherboards, mostly Soyo and Expert (the | >Expert boards are crap, but they're relatively cheap). | > | >All of these have the NCR bios; in fact, I haven't met a PCI motherboard | >on sale here yet that doesn't. YMMV. | | What does NCR (now Symbios) bios support *look* like? My Nexgen PCI-90 as | AMI bios but nothing within its pretty graphic-windowed setup suggests | support of an NCR/Symbios SCSI card. Recently checked a PCI/VL-bus 486 w/ | AMI bios whose setup looked just like my Nexgen except for the addition of | some kind of EPA crap. You should get text with NCR and a version number (mine's 3.04.00 I think) with drive C: set to not installed, however (I'm guessing wildly) the card probably has to be installed (probably wouldn't want that stuff popping up just any old time). I can check mine at home tonite -- pull the card and fire it up to see what screaming it does. Most well behaved BIOS's should have some entry about disabling on-board support if it's incorporated. | | In another discussion elsewhere it was suggested that some | NCR/Symbios-based cards come with a bios support module (on floppy) that | can be combinded with your FLASH bios image and written into the | motherboard FLASH bios. Also hear this often trashes your FLASH bios making | the system totally unusable. Agreed; who's to say what makes for mixing binary contents and making it come out right -- that's why I never mess with non-BIOS SCSI cards. | | As for myself, found a "used" 2940 with no documentation or software (but | looked like it was new in the factory anti-static bag) for $125. | Probably the OEM version (no kit: cables, software, or docs). Good price, though. Just the plain brown wrapper.