VOGONS


First post, by auron

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i have one of these with the original 1.11 BIOS from 1994 and while 4 and 8 GB drives are seemingly detected fine, the machine would lock up every time when trying to boot from a floppy, then would boot fine when unplugging the hard drive, so i'm assuming there's a size limitation. given the popularity of these i'm slightly baffled at the lack of information online, though; beyond the mention of >1GB support in its BIOS config (to be expected given what was out in 1994, i suppose), i could not find any mention anywhere what exactly the size limit on this thing is, and there's no mention of what the 1.16 BIOS does either, beyond stating not to use the 1.23 BIOS on older cards without autoterm, anyway.

a 2 gig limit seems a bit disappointing given these probably weren't the cheapest controllers in their day, and bigger drives were rapidly appearing...

Reply 1 of 4, by Unknown_K

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Are you using the 50 pin or 68 pin port? Do you have a cable with termination of end or are you using the HD's termination?

Collector of old computers, hardware, and software

Reply 2 of 4, by auron

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68-pin, but termination is not the issue as the cable is terminated and the controller correctly terminated as well. everything works fine with a 2940UW.

Reply 3 of 4, by Disruptor

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mkarcher and me haven't examined the 2940's yet but he has fixed the size limit on the EISA 274x and VLB 284x by adding support for extended INT 13h to the BIOS (=BIOS Enhanced Disk Drive Services (EDD)).
Bus width should not matter to this issue.
Be aware that some of the old DOS ASPI drivers may ruin the BIOS' support for EDD.

Reply 4 of 4, by dionb

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No idea about the 2940W, but I know the 2940AU did have exactly this issue, that older BIOSs weren't able to use larger drives:
Adaptec AHA-2940AU BIOS findings